This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Nit-picking literature — Little things bother some people. Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace wonders why little things failed to bother Robinson Crusoe, the hero of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, who spent 28 years documenting his plight as a castaway […]
“Hard, hard to be a baby—Baby animals like you’ve never seen them” is more or less the English translation of the French title of Brooke Barker’s book Dur, dur d’être un bébé—Les bébés animaux comme vous ne les avez jamais vus. The book is full of facts and drawings about many kinds and sizes of […]
If you gave a baby a pacifier [that’s ‘dummy’ in the UK] which was covered in (mildly) irritating bristles, what kind of psychological impact might that have? “Minimal” says the documentation for a newly patented invention that incorporates : “[…] bristle like structures which discourages continued use of the pacifier by a child of appropriate […]
Entitlements inspire this study of adults taking candy from babies: “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 109, no. 11, 2012, pp. 4086-4091. The authors, at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of […]