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 [...]

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 [...]

In his SciAm post addendum (scroll to the bottom), Jesse Bering has been very gracious. This post really isn’t about that now-infamous advice column, but about broader ways to interrogate claims people make. This post is another way of thinking about Sci and my #scio12 session on “Sex, gender and controversy” (see our other session [...]

Back in the day, when many anthropologists assume we were all egalitarian foragers living off the land, women may not have thought on how many offspring they wanted. Contraceptives and abortifacents have likely been with us a very long time, yet various environmental stressors probably suppressed reproductive function enough of the time that this was [...]

This blog post first appeared on my blog on March 4th, 2011. I’m sharing it with the Scientific American audience today because I’ve assigned this post to my students for next week. Plus, who doesn’t love a good John Tierney takedown? My daughter will be three in just a few weeks. She loves telling stories. [...]

This morning was a bit rough. “Where’s Daddy?” asked my daughter as she climbed into bed before dawn to snuggle. “It was Daddy’s turn to go to work early,” I explained. It used to be that I was the parent she turned to for everything. But the last few weeks, with preschool and a new [...]

Whether or not you will live past 70 depends on a seemingly infinite number of small variables: genes, lifestyle, whether or not you are hit by a bus, etcetera. Tied into that prediction have long been race and location. Black males in southern cities, for example, typically have a shorter life expectancy than white males [...]

If someone asked you to sketch a portrait of a gamer who spends countless hours each week inhabiting an avatar—say, an elf or a warlock—in a virtual fantasy world, what kind of person would you draw? A teenage boy whose pimply forehead hovers mere centimeters from the computer screen? Needless to say, such stereotypes are [...]

Guest Blog by Leonard Mlodinow* One advantage of belonging to a cohesive society in which people help each other is that the group is often better equipped than a set of individuals to deal with threats from the outside. People intuitively realize there is strength in numbers, and take comfort in the company of others, [...]

Whether you succeed at work may depend on many factors—intelligence, empathy, self-control, talent and persistence, to name a few. But one determinant may outweigh many of these: how you perceive those around you. New research suggests that your own ability to get things done—not to mention your success in non-work relationships—is highly correlated with how [...]

In the U.S., 90 percent of us get married—and usually without a whole lot of thought. We may do it for love, which is fine, but arguably a dubious reason to tie the knot. You can love someone perfectly well without marrying him, after all. We get married because, that’s what people do. For women [...]