Our Surgeon General, Ourselves

Parenting in America Stinks       Twenty-six years ago, I published a parenting book titled Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent. Good sales numbers this far out from publication, continued attention from media, fan email, and royalty checks that still appear over a quarter of a century later tell me that a book about parenting written by an anthropologist of all things (not a “parenting expert,” not a pediatrician, not a child development researcher) rings true for so many Americans. The recent opinion piece in The…

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Cultural Elite Elegy

What? I Am Part of the Cultural Elite? No Way!     The morning after the election results of November 2016 I was standing outside my apartment talking with a neighbor and knocking around our new world order. He was waxing lyrical about the phrase “Eastern Cultural Elite,” waving his arms inclusively and stating what was obvious to him—that we were both part of that newly criticized and chastised fraction of America. It stopped me. I had never thought of myself as belonging to any politically defined group beyond white and female…

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All Hail the Atlatl

Woman the Able Hunter     As we have been culturally taught, women are considered the “weaker” sex and yet given the chance, women can easily rise to the challenge of unscrewing a jar, opening a stuck window, and moving furniture using a little ingenuity. And now, a recent study of an archaic tool called the atlatl, or spear thrower, proves that this kind of female ingenuity has been serving women for centuries and making them competent hunters alongside men. The atlatl is a simple J-shaped piece of carved wood with a…

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Do Big Brains Make Us Smart?

The Answer is No     Humans have the largest brain-to-body ratio of any animal. We have giant, complicated, brains that should make us the smartest animals on  Earth. But oddly, we spend so much of our time trying to dull that intelligence—we drink alcohol, take drugs, go shopping, have sex, watch TV, look at our phones for hours, read, talk to each other a lot, and spend most of the day with useless thoughts wandering through all those brain cells.   In other words, we have big brains but can’t handle…

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