I generally loathe the winter holidays; winter in general, in fact. I prefer with no exceptions 105-degree weather over any day with a temperature below 60. And winter in Reno is bizarrely unpredictable. We can have more than a foot of snow one day and be wearing shorts in 60-degree sun the next. In the [...]
January 16, 2009
Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. Few have the ability to translate complex ideas into something readable. Even fewer have the ability to do it well. Gladwell is one of those rarities. Outliers: The Story of Success is Gladwell’s latest and arguably his best. In Outliers, Gladwell takes a look at select anecdotes of [...]
September 2, 2008
Think that throwing money and resources at a problem is helpful? Think again. This book shows, in an uncompromising way, how people with the best of intentions to help others end up doing more harm than good. Specifically, Maren takes his first-hand experience, the anecdotes of others and the words and records of the organizations he criticizes, [...]
August 15, 2008
[NOTE: This was originally published in 2001.] [ad#posts] Cynthia Eller wields a cunning scythe. Bit by bit, she hacks away at the roots of goddess-oriented philosophy to reveal a landscape fraught with fantasy, imagination and gobbledygook. Gender studies has a new era upon it, one that must, if taken seriously, heed Eller’s accounting of the rise, and, [...]
July 11, 2008
By Harriet Hall, MD Reprinted from this week’s eSkeptic. Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam, by Pope Brock, is not only a rip-roaring good read, but it brings up serious issues about regulation of medical practice and prosecution of quackery. It tells the story of John R. Brinkley [...]
November 10, 2009
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