Why Art Does Not Exist
This title is adapted from Why Fish Don’t Exist [1] which in turn draws on Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s taxonomy study Naming Nature[2] to support its startling contention. Everyone knows what fish are. But today,...
A Review of Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist
Once I’d finished reading it, I found I needed to really think hard to distil the main idea out of many ideas. For the text does have a complex structure: two genders, three species...
Tintagel in Late Antiquity
Tintagel in Late Antiquity was a conference, held in Truro, Cornwall, April 21-23. Although I am pretty much an outsider, both to archeology and to Cornwall (a transplanted American!) I’m really glad I went...
Gesture and Speech
This book makes human evolution look more exciting and provocative than I would have thought possible. In particular, it explains why, when we know that many, probably most plants and animals have evolved to...
The Piano’s Role
If a movie doesn’t ever let you forget that it’s a movie, but keeps making you wonder how anyone could decide to cast, costume, and direct a scene as he has, you are probably...
Needing a Translator
We’d been skyping for months, both really enjoying it, I think — my husband kept noticing how much laughter was coming from the room where the really big computer lives. I was translating Lambert’s...