They Say / I Blog

Your Brain on Media: Steven Pinker's "Mind Over Mass Media"

Steven Pinker, distinguished Harvard University professor, is one of very few linguists known outside of the discipline, and his five books written for a general audience have all been big hits. How the mind works was a New York Times bestseller in 1998 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, as was his 2003 book, Blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. If anyone is qualified to speculate about the cognitive consequences of 21^st century technologies, he is. This article was published in the Opinion pages of The New York Times on November 6, 2010.

Read it here: Pinker, "Mind over mass media"

 

David Nasaw – “Giving Season”

David Nasaw, professor of history at the City University of New York, specializes in the cultural history of wealth (among other themes). While our current U.S. body politic wrestles with tax cuts and public spending, Nasaw’s article is particularly relevant, since he asks some questions that we are not accustomed to hearing (and provokes us to wonder why not). This article was published in the December 6, 2010 edition of The Nation, a non-partisan weekly magazine of social and political criticism founded in 1865.

Read it here: Nasaw, "Giving Season"