There is something pleasantly upside-down about the fact that I have spent the first part of this summer flying around the world by invitation to various scientific conferences undermining the methodological assumptions I was so keen to defend before my career had even begun. The … Read More →
Monthly Archives: July 2012
Defending reductionism, then not so much (Part I)
Paris in the winter of 1995/96 — the city was chaos because of strikes prompted by a set of neoliberal “reforms.” I am a little embarrassed, in retrospect, by how little I engaged with or understood the enormity of what was going on around me. … Read More →
“The Ashtray” and the realpolitik of scientific revolutions
A while ago now, a friend alerted me to Errol Morris’s series The Ashtray for the NY Times’ Opinionator blog. Morris was writing about his time in graduate school, where he studied philosophy of science (!) with Thomas Kuhn (!!). If you haven’t read this … Read More →
The way of the zebra finch
I have completely forgotten this person’s name, but I am going to call her Crystal Powers, because she so completely embodied a California archetype of the unmoored spiritualist. We were at a party after an art opening and she had asked about my job. At … Read More →
Visions of Jonah
JZ: I’m so glad you could make time to talk to me. It must be a crazy time for you, with all the brouhaha about your book. JL: I wrote it mostly in hotel rooms and in the backs of buses. I was moving pretty much through … Read More →