Selected Writings on Science and Culture

Neurodiversity Rewires Conventional Thinking About Brains

Wired magazine
April 2013
An introduction to the concept of neurodiversity — the notion that potentially disabling conditions like autism, dyslexia, and ADHD reflect a natural diversity of cognitive styles in the human community and deserve support and accommodations from society. “Just because a personal computer is not running Windows doesn’t mean that it’s broken.”
 

Autism Awareness is Not Enough: Here’s How to Change the World

NeuroTribes blog at the Public Library of Science
April 2, 2012
For World Autism Awareness Day 2012, a conversation with autistic people and their families about the practical steps that society should take to build a better world for people on the spectrum and those who love and support them.
 

The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face

NeuroTribes blog at the Public Library of Science
November 22, 2011.
A first look at the early sketches of Susan Kare, the artist who invented the icons for the original Macintosh interface. Kare’s figures, never seen before, developed into the familiar “trashcan” and “paintbrush” icons that became ubiquitous in the digital world. As a result of this post, Kare’s sketchbook was acquired for the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.
 

Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Brilliant Authors

NeuroTribes blog at the Public Library of Science
June 2, 2011
For help and inspiration as I undertook researching and writing NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, I asked 23 of my smartest author-friends, “What do you wish you knew before writing your first book?” Their sensible, insightful answers — from a broad range of bestselling writers, including Carl Zimmer (science), Cory Doctorow (science fiction), August Kleinzahler (poetry), Sylvia Boorstein (Buddhism), and Deborah Blum (medicine) — made this post go viral.
 

Oliver Sacks on Vision, His Next Book, and Surviving Cancer


NeuroTribes blog at the Public Library of Science
Sept. 1, 2010
The first in-depth interview with the neurologist-author of An Anthropologist on Mars about his new book, The Mind’s Eye, and his cancer. Sacks goes into detail about his diagnosis and treatment and how his patients cope with visual disorders like blindness and prosopagnosia (an inability to recognize faces). He also talks about his apprenticeships with poets W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn and the role of science writing in an era when the authority of science is being undermined.
 

The Placebo Problem

Wired magazine
September 2009
The placebo effect is of the most provocative mysteries of medicine, raising questions about the role of belief and expectation in healing. For a complex set of reasons, positive response to the fake drugs used as controls in clinical trials of new drugs seems to be growing stronger worldwide. This is causing a crisis in the development of treatments for depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s, chronic pain, and other ailments, as more experimental drugs fail in late-stage tests. Merck’s William Potter, placebo pioneer Fabrizio Benedetti, Columbia researcher Tor Wager, and Harvard’s Ted Kaptchuk talk about the biological foundations of the body’s self-healing networks, the role that advertising may be playing in the rise of the placebo effect, and a new under-the-radar effort by companies like Merck and Lilly to understand why so many drugs are struggling to prove themselves more effective than sugar pills.
 

Happily Ever After


Shambhala Sun
May 2009
A personal essay on same-sex marriage, the passage of Proposition 8 in California, Buddhism, and the struggle for marriage equality.
 

Where is Jim Gray?


Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend
Wired magazine
August 2007
On January 28, 2007, Microsoft researcher Jim Gray and his sailboat Tenacious vanished off the coast of San Francisco. There was no sign of trouble and no distress call. A digital pioneer whose work helped make possible e-commerce, cash machines, and deep databases like Google, Gray became the object of a heroic search-and-rescue mission organized by scientists and top executives at Microsoft, Oracle, NASA, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Despite the best efforts of the Coast Guard, Gray’s brilliant friends, and more than 12,000 volunteers on Amazon.com who helped analyze satellite data of the Pacific, not a trace of the programmer or his boat has been found. What happened? Includes interviews with Gray’s wife Donna Carnes, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, astronomer Alex Szalay, oceanographer Jim Bellingham, and Coast Guard commander David Swatland.
 

The Invisible Enemy


Wired magazine
February 2007
The first in-depth media investigation of an epidemic of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among American troops who fought in the Iraq war that has spread into civilian hospitals in the US and Europe. Since Operation Iraqi Freedom began, more than 700 US soldiers — plus a significant number of British and Canadian troops and Iraqi civilians — have been infected or colonized with an organism called Acinetobacter baumannii. Now on the rise in hospitals worldwide, the bacteria infects people who are already weak or sick (particularly the elderly, burn victims, newborns, and patients in ICUs) causing blood and bone infections, and in many cases, death. For years, the Defense Department claimed that the source of this bacteria is Iraqi soil blown into soldiers’ wounds by IED attacks. Interviews with current and former military medical staff, and the Pentagon’s own internal reports, however, reveal that the primary source of these infections was contaminated healthcare facilities along the “evacuation chain” that transports wounded soldiers out of Iraq. “For an aspiring superbug, war is anything but hell.
 

Don’t Try This at Home


Wired magazine
June 2006
Do-it-yourself chemistry has always played a crucial role in boosting kids’ interest in science — from chemistry sets, to Mr. Wizard’s home demonstrations, to chem labs at school. Now, however, new laws sparked by fears of terrorism, the war on drugs, and concerns about safety threaten to put an end to amateur chemical experimentation. Classic chemistry sets have all but disappeared, and some online vendors are facing prison sentences for selling common chemicals used in science fairs and model rocketry. Featuring interviews with Bill Nye the Science Guy, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, Nobel-winning chemist Roald Hoffman, leading science educator Bassam Shakhashiri, Popular Science columnist Theodore Gray, and Shawn Carlson of the Society for Amateur Scientists.
 

The Key to Genius


Wired magazine
December 2003
Jazz pianist Matt Savage has released four albums and performed on the Today show, NPR, and at New York’s famed Blue Note jazz club. He’s also 11 years old. Savage is a “musical savant,” born with a mild form of autism. An in-depth examination of what the brains of rare prodigies like Savage tell us about the biological nature of intelligence and creativity, including interviews with neurologist Oliver Sacks and Darold Treffert, the author of Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome.
 

The Bacteria Whisperer

Wired magazine
April 2003
A profile of MacArthur-winning microbiologist Bonnie Bassler and her discoveries in the young field of “quorum sensing” — the study of a system of molecular communication employed by bacteria to make collective decisions, such as delaying the unleashing of virulence until a critical mass of microbes is reached. The ability to conspire and cooperate, it appears, is basic to all life.
 

The Fully Immersive Mind of Dr. Oliver Sacks

Wired magazine
April 2002
The most intimate profile of the late neurologist-author of Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, and other tales from the borderlands of the mind. A comprehensive look at Dr. Sacks’ work in the context of the role of anecdote in medical practice and evolving models of the brain.
 

The Geek Syndrome

Wired magazine
December 2001
An examination of the possible role of genetics and assortative mating in a rise in diagnoses of autism among children in Silicon Valley, including a history of the persistent and provocative association between autistic people and technology.