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Smooth Pebbles

David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, nature, and culture.

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ddsunnysb.jpg Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications; "Buried Answers," one of his features for the Times Magazine, will appear in Houghton Mifflin's esteemed 2006 Best American Science and Nature Writing. The author of three books (see below), he is currently working on a book about the experience and neurobiology of fear. You can find more of his work at his website.

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BOOKS by David Dobbs



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Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.”

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The Great Gulf
An epistemological argument disguised as fish fight.

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The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
An environmental debate misses the most essential relationships in the ecosystem at hand.

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December 22, 2006

Chris Anderson, Media Transparency, and the Beauty and Danger of Dumb Questions

Category: Nota Bene

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, recently raising some juicy issues about what it would be like to bring a Media 2.0 sort of transparency to a Media 1.0 (well, maybe, 1.6) "traditional" magazine like Wired. His proposals address questions that I, as a writer mainly in 1.0 venues like print magazines and books, have been mulling over in a back-of-the-head sort of way.

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December 21, 2006

More more more on Zyrexa, and from the Last Psychiatrist

Category: Brains and minds

In my preceding post, about Eli Lilly pressing primary-care physicans to prescribe the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for elderly dementia, I meant (but forgot) to mention a blog that is following the much wider Zyprexa saga of which this "Dementia is the message" scandal is only a small part.

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Big Pharma Out of Bounds Again

Category: Medicine

I try to keep on top of controversies about drug companies, but lately it's hard to keep up with all the latest revelations and laundry spills -- and to wrap your head around the variations. Today the New York Times reports that Eli Lilly mounted an organized effort to convince doctors to prescribe its powerful schizophrenia and bipolar-disorder drug Zyprexa for elderly patients with symptoms of dementia -- despite that dementia in the elderly rises from causes quite different than those of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, is far less serious problem than schizophrenia, and that Zyprexa seems cause sometimes serious weight gain and susceptibility to diabetes (for which it is facing several lawsuits).

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December 17, 2006

Going, going, gone: This wind needs no weatherman.

Category: Environment/nature

The last month or so I've been pondering what to photograph, as I walk around town, to convey the disturbing wierdness of the weather we've had these last months in Vermont. I live in Montpelier, which is the nation's smallest state capital and generally one of its coldest. (Also the only one without a MacDonald's). It's should be damn cold here by now -- it should have been cold weeks ago -- but we've had four months of autumn.

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