Interactions

Madeline Drexter, How Racism Hurts – Literally
“racism literally hurts the body. More than 100 studies — most published since 2000 — now document the effects of racial discrimination on physical health”

Jamie Davies, Switching Pain Off? Coping with Pain and Pain Experience
Perception and managing pain and even a You Tube Scrubs clip – very funny

Edward Slingerland, Let’s Get Clear about Materialism
A critical take on David Brooks’ Neural Buddhism, and what materialism (e.g., grounding social and psychological phenomena in the brain) really means

P. Pascal Zachary, Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands
Software designers get hands-on with real world objects to learn to think more creatively and intuitively

Cordelia Fine, Words that Can Change Your Mind
The transformative effects of books

Globalization, Development and Change

Matthew Trevisan, Social Networking for Social Change
Social entrepreneurs aim to bring people together to help educate and create change

Reflection Café, The UC Atlas of Global Inequality
Get your fix on online, downloadable maps on inequality worldwide. Reflection Café provides a nice introduction and overview, but if you want to go directly to mapping, by all means do so.

NextBillion.Net, The Newsroom
Check out recent articles and blog posts on enterprise and development aimed for non-established markets and for people at the bottom of the economic food chain

Economist’s View, Wanted: A New Consensus on Globalization
Globalization and global institutions: reflections on what’s needed

Kemal Dervis, How to Build a Strong World Economy
Kermal Dervis heads the UN Development Program and offers his views on present crises and long-term growth

James Meadway, Life after Capitalism
A review of recent books that offer alternatives to capitalism

James Galbraith, Time to Take Control of Markets
Free markets and power: “Under Bush, oil and gas, drug companies and defense contractors, insurers and usurers control the government of the United States and it does what they want. This is the predator state. The wisdom of free markets? The President gave his own verdict in Houston the other day: “Wall Street got drunk.” True enough, but where were the grownups when the party went wild?”

Clay Risen, Pain at the Port
Do rising fuel costs mean the end of globalization? Or further its spread? For a good reaction, see this post on Deepening Globalization

Freakonomics, What Is the Future of Suburbia? and How Should We Be Thinking about Urbanization?
Freakonomics quorums on our changing social ecology

Paul Tough, A Teachable Moment
New Orleans schools rebuild—can reform finally work to create a better school system?

Brain

Podcasts from the 14th Annual Meeting of the Organization of Human Brain Mapping
Features Mel Goodale, Mark D’Esposito, David Van Essen and more

Thomas Ramsoy, Serotonin and Value-Based Decision Making
Serotonin and the ultimatum game—rejecting unfair offers when serotonin chemically manipulated to be lower

Jason Schwartz, Three Months
Brain adaptations during the first 90 days of recovery

Neurophilosophy, The Baller’s Brain (and his pinky)
The neuromechanisms of sporting excellence

Brandon Keim, Uncle Sam Wants Your Brain
The Department of Defense wants neuro-technologies for the military. Besides this Wired piece, here is the executive summary from the National Research Council.

Anthropology

Reihan Salam, The Story of English, or the Global Phase Shift
The language changes around the globe

American Ethnography Quasimonthly
Get your free, classic anthro articles here.

Teaching Anthropology, Podcasting the Other
One anthropologist’s reaction to Apple’s iTunes U

Nicholas Wade, The Genetic Map of Europe
A great graphic, with accompanying article, on the first research systematically describing genetic relationships among European populations and what that means about history, migrations and demographics

Randolph Schmid, Researchers Say Numbers Aren’t Needed to Count
Children who use languages with few numbers still compare quantities. From there, we get the predictable academic (read, socially determined) jump to innateness: “Basic number and arithmetic skills are built on a specialized innate system,” [researcher Brain] Butterworth said. Wired has more details on the research itself.

Animals

Clara Moskowitz, Key to Ant Social Status Found
“Whether an ant becomes a dominant queen or a lowly worker is determined by both nature and nurture, it turns out.”

Ben Hirschler, Magpies Are No Bird-Brains, Mirror Tests Show
Magpies can recognize themselves in mirrors, a classic test for self-awareness