An end of the year mash-up! Enjoy the New Year!

Brian McKenna, Even If Obama Passed Single Payer, Primary Care Doctors Still Wouldn’t Get It
CounterPunch weighs in on real health reform – Jim McKenna the anthropologist and advocate for co-sleeping as pushing the need for communal ideas and population health, not simply biomedical and financial reform

Abigail Zuger, Resilience, Not Misery, in Coping With Death
A new book, The Other Side of Sadness, shows us the new science of bereavement based on interviews, systematic observation, and experimental psychology

Drake Bennett, The Loneliness Network
It’s contagious! And it’s about meaning, or “perceived social isolation” and not actually being alone

Mark Liberman, Framing a Poll
Metaphors are about concepts, not words, and those concepts are embodied. A great new set of experiments from Mark Landau et al. on how metaphors shape political and social attitudes

Stephanie Zvan, Readings in IQ and Intelligence
Quiche Moraine has an excellent set of resources on concepts, measures and debates around IQ measures and intelligence

Justin Marley, Review: The Genetic Basis of Human Brain Evolution
A review of a 2008 Trends in Neuroscience article over at The Amazing World of Psychiatry

Judith Shulevitz, The God Gene
A review of Nicholas Wade’s new book, The Faith Instinct, a guide to the latest evolutionary thinking on religion

Greg Laden, The Argument That Different Races Have Genetically Determined Differences in Intelligence Is Not True.
A good discussion of confusing heritability estimates with inheritance, methods in twin studies, and more.

Lorimer, The Brain in CRPS – More Barriers or New Opportunities
An engaging overview of what’s known about Complex Regional Pain Syndrome in terms of body image, pain perception, and related brain areas

Eric @ PsychLectures, Jane Goodall: What Separates Us from Apes
See the YouTube video

Research Channel, What Is Consciousness?
Get the video of philosopher David Chalmers in action

Oona & Sharon @ AAA, AAA Panel on Ann Dunham Now Available Online
See the video of December’s plenary discussion of Obama’s mother’s work

Lorenz @ Antropologi, AAA Meeting Round-up: What Did All Those Anthropologists Talk About?
Plenty, but only some of it made its way into the media or blogosphere – here’s those links…

Science Daily, Scientists Discover a Controller of Brain Circuitry
Semaphorin – a protein regulator for the assembly of complex circuits in mammalian brains.

Brain Posts, Three Types of Alcoholism
Goldilocks visits the world of alcoholism…

John Jackson, Turning Dissertations into Books
Some presto magic from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Well, kinda presto.

Kimberly Hefling, Back from Combat, Women Struggle For Acceptance
The war continues at home, this time on gendered terrain

William Saletan, The Body Electric
Review of the new book The Department of Mad Machines, which considers our cyborg future through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Gretchen Reynolds, How Much Exercise to Avoid Feeling Gloomy?
Just 20 minutes a week to get a mental health boost according to the latest research