Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary | Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward | University of California Press | 184 pages | $24.95 (Paperback) I’m willing to bet you own at least one pair of jeans. Denim clothing—which will be used interchangeably with jeans for this discussion—is popular with people just about everywhere, with the [...]

To mark Valentine’s Day, I’m posting an early piece that originally appeared on the old home of Anthropology in Practice. Hope your connections are everything you hope for today. A lingering look. A coy smile. Standing just a bit too close. An accidental brush. Flirtation is an art. It is also a deftly employed social [...]

It’s true that pictures can be worth a thousand words. The images I’ve collected in the Signs of Life album represent a particular look at the things that constitute my life—as well of the lives of many others who exist in the same communities as I do. These pictures represent the heart of anthropology in [...]

Sheril Kirshenbaum, science writer and author of The Science of Kissing, has an interesting discussion on why we kiss and how kisses work to stimulate chemistry between two people: A kiss puts two people in very close proximity. Our sense of smell allows us to pick up subconscious clues about the other person’s DNA or [...]

Ed Note: Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. [...]

Ed note: As Halloween rapidly approaches in the US, AiP will be exploring superstitions, beliefs, and the things that go bump in the night. This post originally appeared on AiP on May 17th, 2011, in response to Zombie Awareness Month—oh, it’s real all right. It’s been slightly modified for this posting. I think I must [...]

On any given day, millions of conversations reverberate through New York City. Poke your head out a window overlooking a busy street and you will hear them: all those overlapping sentences, only half-intelligible, forming a dense acoustic mesh through which escapes an exclamation, a buoyant laugh, a child’s shrill cry now and then. Every spoken [...]

I think my umbilical hernia is getting bigger. I’ve had it since my pregnancy over five years ago, the result of diastasis, a situation where the abdominal muscles pull apart from the baby taking up so much darn room. I’ve consulted with a surgeon, and the hernia is tiny, not worth fixing until I’m done [...]

Life history trade-offs are the bread and butter of biological anthropology. The way we understand the importance of certain traits and life events is in how they vary in response to selection pressures like energy availability or climate, but also cultural beliefs and practices. That’s why it matters to us when you got your first [...]

It was getting late, the student center all but deserted. My old friend and I had a table to ourselves, awkwardly wedged among the chairs that had been set in a circle for an invited talk I had just given to some undergraduates about issues for women in science. My friend alluded to having a [...]

Earlier this semester I talked about a few new kinds of assignments I was trying out in my evolutionary medicine class. I’ve got my students posting on the readings every week at the group blog, and there have been several great interactions. For instance, here is a thoughtful comment on one student’s post: “…I have [...]

Field experiences are often what help an undergraduate decide whether or not to pursue biological anthropology, they determine the course of a graduate student’s dissertation, and they provide the data needed to launch grants and make tenure cases for faculty. Yet, because field experiences often occur in remote places, far from our universities, entirely different [...]

(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 [...]

Just wanted to give a quick heads up to those of you who follow on the blog but not on Twitter or Facebook (personal, blog) that Chris Chambers and I have a piece in the Guardian today responding to the recent pseudoscience on why more girls don’t pursue science in places like the US and [...]

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 [...]

This here blog is many things — ladybusiness explainer, bad science outer, and a place where I reflect on higher education and the academic life. Today is the last day of the semester here at the U of I, there’s a lovely dusting of snow on everything, and it seemed like a nice time to [...]

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 [...]

Two recent science stories, one in anthropology and the other in physics, have me wondering which field is "hard" and which "soft." The first story involves the decision of the American Anthropological Association to delete the word "science" from its mission statement. That step provoked squawks from anthropologists who’ve struggled to counter the image of [...]

Why war? Darwinian explanations, such as the popular "demonic males" theory of Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, are clearly insufficient. They can’t explain why war emerged relatively recently in human prehistory—less than 15,000 years ago, according to the archaeological record—or why since then it has erupted only in certain times and places. Many scholars solve this [...]

Thirty-two years after her death, the anthropologist Margaret Mead remains a favorite whipping girl for ideologues of all stripes. Did you know that she cooked up the global-warming "hoax"? Some over-the-top global warming deniers say it all started in 1975 when Mead organized a conference to address overpopulation. Most attacks on Mead focus on her [...]

Most of us are familiar with a 28-day menstrual cycle, which, divided in half, comprises the follicular phase – that’s when the dominant follicle, or egg, is growing and preparing for ovulation – and the luteal phase – when the endometrium, or lining of the uterus, is preparing for possible conception and implantation. If implantation [...]

Pygmy populations, scientists have speculated, may owe their abbreviated stature to natural selection pressures that allowed them to better adapt to dense tropical forests where heat is oppressive and food is scarce. “An outstanding question for many, many years among anthropologists and human geneticists has been what is the genetic basis of the short stature [...]

RALEIGH, N.C.—Bone-hunters and anthropologists typically guard their fossils as priceless specimens. I’ve learned to ask: “Is that real or a cast?” when shown a specimen. Often it’s a replica. So, I was as thrilled as a 12-year-old today when I saw two real, contemporary human skeletons and several human skulls during a tour here of [...]

Before everyone gets their feathers ruffled that this casting call is looking for a male, just know he is to be a co-host to a female. Now that that is clear….. SEEKING CO-HOST FOR MAJOR CABLE NETWORK Major Cable Network dedicated to Nature, Science and Exploration, is currently casting a Co-Host for new project examining [...]

When I opened the November 2011 issue of Scientific American and leafed through it, I was immediately drawn to one of the highlights of the issue: illustrations for the cover story about The First Americans. They were done by illustrator Tyler Jacobson, with art direction by Michael Mrak and Jen Christiansen. Here in the interview below, [...]

Communicating science through art is sometimes still in its nascent stages, I think.  While traditional + digital scientific illustration using representational techniques will always be central to reaching out with new research, less traditional aesthetic approaches can be just as illuminating and effective at communicating science.  And we’re starting to see some of that develop [...]

Ever since his death in 1955, scientists have asked what features of Einstein’s brain contributed to his extraordinary insights into physical laws. Research on the anatomy of Einsteins’ genius was stymied because many of the post-mortem images and slides of tissue from the subsequently dissected organ were unavailable to researchers. The story is complex and [...]