(Alternate, Twitter-sourced titles: “5 Ways to Prove Darwin Wasn’t Crazy,” “Shut the Eff Up and Science Already,” “5 Ways Psychology Needs to Evolve.”) Evolutionary psychology, the study of human psychological adaptations, does not have a popular or scientific reputation for being rigorous, even though there are rigorous, thoughtful scientists in the field. The field is [...]

It’s vacation time for Team Family, as my daughter calls us. While we’re skating and skiing, enjoy this repost from my old blog on hormonal contraceptives and mate choice. Imagine you are a single, heterosexual woman. You meet a nice man at the driving range, or on a blind date. You like him and he [...]

I tend to go to bed freezing, especially so in the winter, so I pile our flannel sheet, blanket, and down comforter over me when I settle in to sleep. A few times each menstrual cycle, clustered together in the luteal phase between ovulation and menses, I wake up from sleep completely soaked in my [...]

Lady bones are delicate, selfless, dense connective tissue that hold lady bodies up to help the lady vessel carry babies. When we are pregnant, the thinking goes, lady bones give up their calcium in vast quantities, depleting themselves for the good of their darling fetuses. We ladies mostly replete this calcium between pregnancies. Then of [...]

You all must forgive me for this blog post. You see, I am in my premenstrual phase, and so with all my insane-o premenstrual symptoms I simply cannot access the part of my brain that makes political decisions. Perhaps when I get through the devastation and physical wreckage we ladies like to think of as [...]

Another year, another podium presentation. This year I want to redeem myself: last year I rocked my first presentation on hormonal contraception (woo hoo!), then was too exhausted to be remotely coherent for my second on diet composition and C-reactive protein (though to be fair, I was also chairing that session). This year I have [...]

In high school, my mother occasionally found babysitting jobs for me. Parents, desperate for a trustworthy kid to watch their own, would entrust their offspring to Katie the honors student while they went to a meeting, or to work, or perhaps on a date. If any of those parents are reading, I have a confession [...]