Today is Bloomsday, June 16. On this day in 1904 Leopold Bloom, hero of James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses, wandered through Dublin having all manner of adventures before returning late at night to the bed of his cheating wife Molly. To celebrate Bloomsday, I’m reposting an appreciation of Ulysses that I wrote last summer when [...]

I’m not a big fan of the literary sub-genre of political rhetoric, even the best examples of which usually reduce to schmaltzy, self-aggrandizing propaganda. I nonetheless love the so-called “Peace Speech” given exactly 50 years ago by President John F. Kennedy. Speaking at the commencement of American University, Washington, D.C., on June 10, 1963, Kennedy [...]

Yesterday I posted a column presenting the views of Dave Farber, “Grandfather of the Internet,” on cybersecurity. I interviewed Farber on May 26, shortly before a flood of reports (the first of which was in The Guardian, a British newspaper) that the U.S. is monitoring telephone and Internet communications of ordinary citizens. Farber anticipated these [...]

Over the last few years, the rhetoric if not the actuality of cyberwarfare has been escalating. Every day, it seems, the media report on alleged cyberattacks–by nations, terrorist organizations or criminal gangs–against U.S. governmental institutions and corporations. Many of these allegations are being made by individuals or groups that stand to benefit from increased funding [...]

Is religious fundamentalism a form of mental illness? That’s what Kathleen Taylor, a researcher at the University of Oxford and author of three books on neuroscience, suggested this week, according to Huffington Post. In the future, Taylor said, brain researchers may learn so much about the neural basis of fundamentalism that they can cure people [...]

Since Barack Obama became President, I’ve beaten up on him for being so hawkish, for perpetuating U.S. militarism–and hence militarism in general—as a way to solve conflicts. In a major speech yesterday at the National Defense University in McNair, Virginia, Obama took a few tiny steps toward becoming the Peace President many voters hoped he [...]

In two recent posts (here and here), I complained that the big new BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, to which Barack Obama has committed $110 million next year and possibly billions over the next decade, may be premature. I stupidly neglected to mention an important reason to look askance at the initiative: [...]

The old issue of genes, race and intelligence has exploded once again. The trigger this time is social scientist Jason Richwine, who recently co-authored a study of immigration for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The study contended that granting amnesty to illegal immigrants could cost the U.S. more than $5 trillion. After the [...]

I’ve been mulling over how I should follow up my previous post, the one with the subtle headline “Crisis in Psychiatry!” My meta-theme is that science has failed to deliver a potent theory of and therapy for the human mind. I’ve made this same point previously, notably in my 1996 Scientific American article “Why Freud [...]

In 2007, while teaching at George Johnson’s Science Writing Workshop in Santa Fe, I met a talented young writer named Jessica Reed. We’ve stayed in touch over the years and corresponded on many topics, especially on mental health issues. After my recent rant “Crisis in Psychiatry!,” which riffs on the latest debate over the Diagnostic [...]