“Prominent Scholar Was Banned From Campus: In fracas over charges of fraud, the accuser was penalized for threatening behavior,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 3, 2013. The noted evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers had been at adds with a colleague as he tried for years to retract an article the two had co-written (with others). Did he cross a line?
“A Radical Anthropologist Finds Himself in Academic ‘Exile,’” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 15, 2013. David Graeber, arguably the most influential anthropologist on the planet, can’t get a job in the States. (Paywall. pdf)
“Don’t Listen to Those Scary Tales of Student-Loan Debt,” Washington Post, March 21, 2013. Media coverage focuses too much on outlier cases–baristas with $120,000 in debt–thereby scaring poor kids from making a sensible investment in college.
“Is Scientific Truth Always Beautiful? A mathematician says the quest for elegance leads too many researchers astray,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 28, 2013. “Warfare Under the Radar,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, Dec. 12, 2012. The military scholar and author Peter W. Singer argues that drone warfare and a growing civilian-military divide make war too easy.
“The Welfare State’s Secret Weapon: How disaster relief, from the New Deal to Hurricane Sandy, has spurred positive views of government,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 3, 2012. Did disaster relief provide the legal foundation for the New Deal?
“The Data Vigilante,” the Atlantic, December 2012. A sketch of the Penn psychologist Uri Simonsohn, who has been campaigning against sloppy statistics in psychology — and caught two cases of fraud.
“IQ Wars Continue With Battles Over New Puzzles: A pioneering scholar poses more challenges to the validity of intelligence tests,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 29, 2012. (Profile of James Flynn, discoverer of the “Flynn effect”—i.e., the notion that IQ’s have been rising for at least a century.)
“Why Power Corrupts,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2012. New research suggests that power brings out the best in some people and the worst in others.
“When One Biographer ‘Borrows’ From Another, the Dispute Gets Philosophical,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2012. Did Julian Young lean too heavily on an earlier book by Curtis Cate?
“The New Science of the Birth and Death of Words,” March 16, 2012, Wall Street Journal Review. Physicists make a contribution to linguistics, using Google data.
“The New Tastemakers,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, January 18, 2012. Book-review sections are dying. What’s taking their place?
“Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Washington Post, Dec. 16, 2011 — a review of the new book by the influential psychologist Daniel Kahneman, December 16, 2011.
“Fraud Scandal Fuels Debate Over Practices of Social Psychology,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 13, 2011. Can we trust all those snappy, counterintuitive research findings? [pdf]
“An Unconventional Meeting of Minds,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2011. Harvard’s Larry Lessig invited Tea Party leaders to Cambridge. [pdf] “Rule Breaker,” Chronicle, June 2011. A profile of the neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland, who has a contrarian view of human morality.
“We Built This City on Hipsters and Airports,” Washington Post, April 2011. Review of “The Triumph of the City,” by Edward Glaeser, and “Aerotropolis,” by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay.