Rebecca is that weird person reading a book by herself in a restaurant. She’s a parent, an atheist in a very red state, an amateur pianist, a student of the German language, and curator of a joyfully bizarre music collection, with room for everything from grime-punk to metal to Bach cantatas. She is curious about so many things, but particularly cognitive science, music, language, parenting, the history of medicine, and psychology and mental health. Rebecca has degrees in English and Linguistics and has held a variety of writing jobs over the years, including grant writing for nonprofits, copy editing for a publishing company, and most recently, proposal writing. Email: brannicr [at] gmail.com
by Rebecca Baumgartner I don’t want to write this and you don’t want to read it. But this is the world we live in. As I write this, it’s been three weeks since a man without a criminal record legally purchased a trunk-full of guns, opened fire at the Allen Premium Outlets mall and killed…
by Rebecca Baumgartner Last year, I watched a Kurzgesagt video about the science of how gratitude practices can make you happier, so I decided to start a gratitude journal. It could only help, right? I started jotting down a variety of things I was grateful for: my family, my piano, my cats and dog, my…
by Rebecca Baumgartner A Conversation “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” –Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1791 “Many others … say that it is dangerous and absurd to base modern public safety on…
by Rebecca Baumgartner A few years ago when I was working at a large corporation, I walked into the lobby one morning in March, bleary-eyed and clutching a thermos of coffee, and was startled to see an enormous pink banner covered in flowers, proclaiming in a swirling cursive font that the company was “honoring women”…
by Rebecca Baumgartner The cultural cachet of classical music and the countercultural tone of metal music would initially seem at odds with each other – one represents the Man, the other rails against him. Even many of the aficionados of both types of music would agree with that assessment. However, the listener unencumbered with such…
by Rebecca Baumgartner Parenting is one of the domains where certain people scoff at the idea that reading a book or article could possibly be helpful. “That’s nice and all,” the complaint goes, “but when it comes to real life, all those ideal scenarios fly out the window.” The other group of parents, the ones…
by Rebecca Baumgartner While watching a Christmas movie recently and hearing a character describe something as a “Christmas miracle,” my 8-year-old son scornfully exclaimed, “That’s not a Christmas miracle, that’s a Christmas coincidence!” He was right, of course, but despite that outburst, he’s not the kind of kid who would tell the other third-graders that…
by Rebecca Baumgartner There’s a fascinating figure wandering aimlessly around the halls of psychology on the internet, and his name is Robert Epstein. Epstein is a 69-year-old psychologist who trained in B.F. Skinner’s pigeon lab in the 70s and now works at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California, a nonprofit supporting…
by Rebecca Baumgartner We prefer not to think about our own ignorance. We hope it sorts itself out as we get older and presumably wiser. We especially resent having it pointed out to us – which of course is very counterproductive if the goal is to get rid of it. The better approach is to…
by Rebecca Baumgartner There’s a pervasive idea that there must be works of art and culture that contain “people who look like me,” where “looking like” is usually scanned as race, ethnicity, sex, or gender expression. This clique-ish attitude masquerades as liberalism and can twist your head in knots if you let it: rather than…
by Rebecca Baumgartner Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the Antarctic explorer who would become famous for documenting Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition in his book The Worst Journey in the World, wrote a letter in 1919 in which he cast doubt on the purity of the motives of one of the expedition members, Lieutenant Edward “Teddy” Evans: “There will…be…
by Rebecca Baumgartner In T.H. White’s masterpiece The Once and Future King, Merlyn’s recommendation for “see[ing] the world around you devastated by evil lunatics” is to learn something: “There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing the mind…
by Rebecca Baumgartner In his book Enlightenment Now, when discussing the drastic improvements in quality of life over the past several decades, Steven Pinker says that “the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor. Perhaps the liberation of women in general.” The most exciting promise of…
