Joseph LeDoux: Neuroscientist and Expert on Fear and Anxiety, Tues. 9/27

Casey Schwartz reviews Joseph LeDoux's new book, Anxious, in New York magazine.

"If this is the age of anxiety, LeDoux is our Lewis and our Clark: It was LeDoux who laid down the first map of what is called the brain’s 'fear circuit,' the regions — centered on the amygdala and its adjacent structures — that together give rise to our ability to respond to threats and danger. But with his new book, he wants to redraw that map...."

LeDoux visits Albany next week. More about his visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ledoux_joseph16.html#.V-QMe01kDs0


More from Schwartz's review in New York:  http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/07/everybody-misunderstanding-fear-and-anxiety.html

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NY Times Book Critics' Top Ten Lists of 2014

Six books by past visitors to UAlbany, under the sponsorship of the New York State Writers Institute, appear on the new top ten lists of New York Times book critics Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin and Dwight Garner.

They include Country Girl by Edna O'Brien, The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart, The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, Lila by Marilynne Robinson, and All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu.

Picture:  Edna O'Brien.

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Eric Kandel, Writer and Scientist, Leads Breakthrough Study on Memory

Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine who visited the Writers Institute in 2006, is the lead researcher of a new study on memory in the brain (with new implications for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease). The study is receiving widespread media coverage, and widespread attention in the neuroscience community.

The 84-year-old laureate came to the New York State Writers Institute to present his memoir, In Search of Memory, about his boyhood as a member of a Jewish family in Nazi Germany and his remarkable career at the leading edge of neuroscience.

More on the new study:  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57600507/scientists-find-clue-to-reasons-for-age-related-memory-loss/

More on Kandel's visit to Albany:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/kandel_eric.html

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John Randel Exhibit at Museum of City of New York

John Randel's impact on New York City was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of the City The Greatest Grid-- The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011.
of New York:

You can still view much of the exhibit online:  http://www.mcny.org/exhibitions/past/The-Greatest-Grid.html

Randel is the subject of a new biography by Marguerite Holloway, who visits on Thursday.

More about her visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/holloway_marguerite13.html

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The Next Big One, Tonight with David Quammen

"By the Next Big One, I mean a murderous pandemic that sweeps around the planet, killing millions of people, as the so-called 'Spanish' influenza did in 1918-19, as AIDS has been doing in slower motion, and as SARS might have done in 2003 if it hadn’t been stopped by fast science, rigorous measures of public health, and luck. Experts I’ve interviewed over the past six years generally agree that such a Next Big One is not only possible but probable.... From where will the Next Big One emerge? Answer, as I’ve noted: Most likely from wildlife. It will be a zoonosis — an animal infection that spills over into humans."

Read more in Yale Environment 360:  http://e360.yale.edu/mobile/feature.msp?id=2579
Quammen visits today at 4:15 and 8PM in the UAlbany Campus Center:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#david

Photo from the 1918 flu pandemic.

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Quammen on Fact vs. Fiction

Science writer David Quammen, who visits today, talks to Terrain.org about the responsibility of nonfiction writers not to take creative liberty with the facts:

"Fact or truth, yeah, that question. I utterly distrust the word truth. I detest it when writers claim they are hedging on factuality in service to higher truth. Or sometimes it's the essential truth of a situation. Bullshit. Nonfiction should be composed, artfully but conscientiously, like a mosaic, from bits of accurate fact. Is it an art form? well, it can be, it should be. Artful, imaginative, accurate: this combination of adjectives is not contradictory. Readers should demand this of their nonfiction, and not settle for self-indulgent, falsified jive. The form in which this boundary has been most egregiously violated recently is the memoir. Ugh."

Read more:  http://www.terrain.org/interview/21/

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Of Bats, Pythons and the Marburg Virus

Read an excerpt from Spillover, David Quammen's new book about emergent pandemics.

Quammen visits the Writers Institute tomorrow, Thursday.

"Astrid Joosten was a 41-year-old Dutch woman who, in June 2008, went to Uganda with her husband. At home in Noord-Brabant, she worked as a business analyst. Both she and her husband, Jaap Taal, a financial manager, enjoyed annual adventures, especially to Africa. The journey in 2008, booked through an adventure-travel outfitter, took them to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, home to mountain gorillas. While there, the operators offered an optional trip, to a place called the Maramagambo Forest, where the chief attraction was a peculiar site known as Python Cave. African rock pythons lived there, languid and content, grown large and fat on a diet of bats."

More in The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/sep/28/deadly-viruses-ebola-marburg-sars

More on Quammen's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/quammen_david12.html

Picture:  Egyptian fruit bats, Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda

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An Embarrassment for the Pulitzer Jury

"Mr. Quammen... is not just among our best science writers but among our best writers, period.... That he hasn’t won a nonfiction National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize is an embarrassment."

So writes Dwight Garner this month in the New York Times.

Read the article here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/books/spillover-by-david-quammen-on-how-animals-infect-humans.html?_r=0

Quammen visits us tomorrow:

David Quammen, nature writer and author
October 18 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus

David Quammenis one of America’s leading nature writers. His new book is Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (2012), about his travels in the remote corners of the globe with field researchers investigating disease outbreaks in rats, monkeys, bats, pigs, and other species, with the potential to “spillover” to humans. Walter Isaacson described the book as “a frightening and fascinating masterpiece of science reporting that reads like a detective story.” A widely-travelled contributing writer for National Geographic, and the author of the column, “Natural Acts,” for Outside magazine for 15 years, Quammen has written several nonfiction bestsellers, including The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006), Monster of God (2003), The Boilerplate Rhino (2001), and The Song of the Dodo (1996).

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s School of Public Health

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Surviving Killer Asteroids

Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, who visited the Writers Institute in 2004, discusses ways of coping with killer asteroids, today in Wired.

"Solar System debris rains down on Earth in vast quantities — more than a hundred tons of it a day. Most of it vaporizes in our atmosphere, leaving stunning trails of light we call shooting stars. More hazardous are the billions, likely trillions, of leftover rocks — comets and asteroids — that wander interplanetary space in search of targets." More.

Tyson came to Albany to discuss The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist (2000), Tyson. In the memoir, he traces the arc of his remarkable life, from his beginnings as an eccentric African-American kid who loved to study the night sky from the roof of his Bronx apartment building, to his role as one of the most influential scientists in his field.

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Seth Mnookin: The Importance of Wasting Time

Seth Mnookin, who visited in March of 2011, interviews Pulitzer-winning science journalist Amy Harmon about the challenges of writing long journalistic pieces.

The blog interview is titled, "Long-form narratives, crappy first drafts, and the importance of wasting time."

HARMON: There are different types of long-form narratives, so maybe it’s worth explaining first that I tend to do what are sometimes called “story narratives.’’ They have a plot and they are told through scenes and dialogue. They also have an argument, or at least a point, embedded in them, but it is often not explicitly stated, or perhaps only stated briefly in two or three “nut graphs” near the top. Like in a novel or a movie, the payoff comes at the end, so you need to make readers care about what happens to these characters, and if you can’t, you’re kind of screwed, because you then you have nothing.

These are different from explanatory narratives, which weave a story together with direct commentary by the reporter and/or experts the reporter has talked to; or essays, where you strive for a provocative argument; or profiles, where the point is to provide insight into an individual at a particular moment; or investigations. More.

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Masha Gessen: Breasts Old and New

Masha Gessen, who visits 3/8, wrote an extraordinary series of articles for Slate in 2004 in advance of undergoing a double mastectomy in 2005 after discovering that she possessed a genetic mutation that predisposed her to a deadly form of breast cancer.

"All of this abstract talk about breasts—other women's breasts, breasts in general—is of limited application when I am trying to think about cutting off my own. So, it's time for full disclosure. For years, other people liked my breasts more than I did. The usual pubescent discomfort with a changing body lasted longer for me than it does for many women: I thought my breasts were too large, and, looking androgynous and liking it, I didn't particularly enjoy having breasts. Over the years, as I got into better shape, they actually got a bit smaller...." More.

A fuller discussion of her experiences (before and after) is presented in her book, Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene (2008).

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