Andrew Sullivan, gay political pundit and blogger at The Daily Beast, lobbed some rather nasty insinuations my way last Wednesday. He was flabbergasted that any fellow gay man could possibly think that infant male circumcision is justifiable. “The whole thing is madness,” wrote Sullivan, disgusted with the very thought of it. Now before I [...]

If you were to have told me just last week that one of my psychology experiments would soon be brought to life on stage by none other than Clint Eastwood at the Republican National Convention, all to the fêted laughter and applause of tens of millions of people who, in the true spirit of literalism for [...]

In addition to my occasional blog here at Scientific American, please follow along with me at my other hotspots: Slate: http://www.slate.com/authors.jesse_bering.html Das Magazin (in German): http://dasmagazin.ch/dasMagazin/index.html Personal website: www.jessebering.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=739554045 and of course, Twitter: @jessebering

Poor Mitt Romney. It must have been so awful for him in the late 1960s. While other young men were tanning themselves in sun-drenched Vietnam, Mitt was cast off to the unmentionable Hell of Bordeaux and Paris. There he was, a fresh-faced, painfully wealthy Mormon missionary, just out of prep school and probably exhausted from [...]

(The following is a companion piece to the Slate article, “Eugene Hoskins Is His Name: The long-forgotten story of a black autistic man in Oxford, Miss., who crossed paths with William Faulkner.” You can read that story by clicking here.) When Professor Hiram Byrd opened up the autistic savant Eugene Hoskins’ private notebook back in [...]

The following is an edited excerpt from The Belief Instinct, which will be released as a paperback on Feb. 20. When I moved to my previous house in a small village in Northern Ireland in late 2007, there was still quite a bit of work to be done, including laying flooring in an intolerably small, [...]

Dear Jesse, I have a pretty serious porn/Internet addiction. Yeah, yeah, every other guy says they’re addicted, but for me it has impeded school, sleep, eating, and socializing. I’ve failed classes because of it and lost friends. Last semester, I probably spent more time online than I did sleeping. Often, I would go multiple days [...]

There are very few things that I can complain about regarding my childhood. I had wonderful parents. Lovely people, really. And this makes their heinous breach of parental olfactory responsibilities all the more incomprehensible. You remember Pig-Pen in the Peanuts cartoons? That was me. I think you can even make out the haze of stink [...]

Back when I was a graduate student in Louisiana studying chimpanzees, I came across a chapter from an old book called The Speech of Monkeys. First released in 1892, it was a pioneering text in animal behavior and the study of nonhuman communication, published by the very respectable Charles L. Webster and Company, the house [...]

I’ve always wanted to write my very own advice column, a sort of “Ask Jesse” sort of thing. Unfortunately, not only are advice columns desperately overplayed these days, but I also have absolutely no commonsense. In fact, I’ve a very long list of bodily scars, debts, disgruntled students and enemies to prove my amazing lack [...]