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Bowie’s Duet with Himself
I made my first infographic. Or a stab at one. My students are making some, so I thought I should try it too. My students didn’t know Bowie’s “A Space Oddity.” I tried to hide my shock. But now they know a lot about it. Bowie recorded “A Space Oddity” in 1968. It was his…
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The Trouble with Reality
Some days I wish Oprah could be President for a few weeks, just so she could lead a national book club, stealthily getting the entire population to read the same book at the same time. Today, I hope she’d begin with Brook Gladstone’s The Trouble with Reality. It’s an easy read, short and full of…
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Memory and Memoir
People ask me how I remember so much of my childhood? Part of the answer is that I have an obsessive memory. Some people respond to hardship and trauma by forgetting. Some doing it by remembering. Some with a confusing combination of both. Any of these responses can be therapeutic; any of them can be…
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The Original californica
Meet Aplysia californica, the sea slug whose starring role in the history of neuroscience was a revelation when I started reading about the brain. “Aplysia californica” is the first piece I published from my memoir, The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism. The book is a portrait of an artist as a biological and social…
