Cordelia Fine and Carole Hooven at Aeon Magazine:
A unique aspect of human developmental systems are our rich, cumulative cultures, which we inherit along with our genes. Thousands of years of gendered cultures, together with our evolved and unparalleled capacity for social learning, might have reduced the need for genes to be the ‘carriers’ of sex-linked behavioural features. Instead, as John Dupré, Daphna Joel and I have suggested, these traits could stabilise through norms that tell us what it means to be a woman or a man, and that are transferred across generations. If a male California mouse reliably inherits a father who will huddle and groom him, that’s a developmental resource that doesn’t have to be redundantly locked into genetically inherited biology. And if a male human reliably inherits a rich gendered culture that provides ample information and instruction about how to be man, along with minds tuned to acquire, enforce and internalise those norms, there’s much less need for genetic mechanisms to enforce the development of gendered traits, beyond a neural capacity for learning.
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So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, “The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,” Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information.
Among the many grievances aired by Norman Podhoretz in his insufferable 1967 memoir Making It is an already septic grudge concerning The New Yorker’s publication of James Baldwin’s most famous essay in 1962. Titled, following the magazine’s convention, “
“That Cajun blackened shrimp recipe looks really good,” I tell my husband while scrolling through cooking videos online. The presenter describes it well: juicy, plump, smoky, a parade of spices. Without making the dish, I can only imagine how it tastes. But a new device inches us closer to recreating tastes from the digital world directly in our mouths. Smaller than a stamp, it contains a slurry of chemicals representing primary flavors like salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and savory (or umami). The reusable device mixes these together to mimic the taste of coffee, cake, and other foods and drinks.
Each balloon carried two copilots vying to prevail in the 1995 Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett, ballooning’s oldest and most prestigious aeronautical race. The goal was to travel the farthest distance possible before landing. Only the world’s most daring and decorated aeronauts could claim a spot in the field. The race typically lasted one or two days, and occasionally stretched into a third. No Gordon Bennett balloon had ever flown a fourth night, but favorable weather and a stretch of newly opened airspace now made that feat attainable for the first time. “It was fabulous, and we knew it,” said Martin Stürzlinger, a member of the ground crew for a balloon called the D-Caribbean.
The college essay is a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests. The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they’ve faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground.
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Five scientists who contributed to the development of the 
Back in 2014, a woman with advanced cancer pushed Adrienne Boire’s scientific life in a whole new direction. The cancer, which had begun in the breast, had found its way into the patient’s spinal fluid, rendering the middle-aged mother of two unable to walk. “When did this happen?” she asked from her hospital bed. “Why are the cells growing there?” Why, indeed. Why would cancer cells migrate to the spinal fluid, far from where they’d been birthed, and how did they manage to thrive in a liquid so strikingly poor in nutrients? Boire, a physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, decided that those questions deserved answers.