“Hair-Power Performativity” published

An illustration called “Cut It Out” by the Italian artist Marco Melgrati in support of Iranian women’s protest (center image, above) was the inspiration for a draft text we workshopped at NeuWrite Nordic last autumn. The text, a collaborative hybrid of social-science and storytelling titled “Hair-Power Performativity,” was published this week in the Barcelona-based journal…

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Sex, fads, and math

Scientists might use a term like “computed statistics of social synchrony” to refer to what normal people might call sex, fads, and math. Our two texts this month brought us together around these questions: Can mathematical models describe the mating rituals of fireflies, the love life of secret agents, and treatment trends in hospitals? Firefly…

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A long overdue evolutionary account of women

A New York Times bestselling book comes out of NeuWrite: Scientist and creative writer Cat Bohannon is a long-time member of the NeuWrite creative science-writing workshop group in New York City, where she completed her PhD at Columbia University on the evolution of narrative and cognition. In an inspiration to those of us workshopping our…

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The entanglement of subject and object

Sir Isaac Newton thought light consisted of particles, until Thomas Young’s famous “double-slit experiment”, believed to have been performed in 1801, suggested that light actually took the form of waves. But this wasn’t a simple case of “scientific progress”, where an old idea was replaced by a new one. As the philosopher of science Karen…

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