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Collage of DNA sequence and scientists, reading "Your Child's IQ: What Role Does Heredity Play?"

Losing the Genetic Lottery

How did a field meant to reclaim genetics from Nazi abuses wind up a haven for race science?
by Padmini Raghunath via Distillations on April 6, 2023
A still from the film "The Manchurian Candidate," in which a military officer interrogates a nervous, sweating man.

Brainwashing Has a Grim History That We Shouldn’t Dismiss

Scientific research and historical accounts can help us identify and dissect the threat of ‘coercive persuasion.’
by Joel E. Dimsdale via Psyche on November 24, 2021
A man hooked up to receive shocks as part of the Milgram experiment

The Hidden Meaning of a Notorious Experiment

In Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience, people believed they were giving shocks to others. But did their compliance say much about the Nazis?
by Allison Miller via JSTOR Daily on January 7, 2021
Evelyn Hooker

The Pioneering Psychologist Who Proved that Being Gay isn’t a Mental Illness

How a friendship between a straight psychology professor and her gay student busted the myth of homosexuality as an illness.
by Robyn Schelenz via University Of California Press Blog on June 26, 2020

How the Midlife Crisis Came to Be 

The midlife crisis went from an obscure psychological theory to a ubiquitous phenomenon.
by Pamela Druckerman via The Atlantic on May 29, 2018

Is Racism a Disease?

Is a psychological diagnosis a useful way to view racism-or does it merely absolve the racist of blame?
by Rebecca Onion via Slate on November 17, 2016

The True Story of Phineas Gage Is Much More Fascinating Than the Mythical Textbook Accounts

Each generation revises his myth. Here’s the true story.
by Sam Kean via Slate on May 7, 2014
Book Cover of "An Ordinary White."

Basic Stuff About Reality

On David Roediger’s “An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education.”
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via Los Angeles Review of Books on March 28, 2025
Wooden mannequin propped up with head hung low.

How a Scientific Consensus Collapsed

The curious case of social psychology.
by Jacob Mikanowski via The Chronicle of Higher Education on February 20, 2025
A drawing of a person staring at two different smartphones, with robotic arms holding their head in place.

What If the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?

From the pianoforte to the smartphone, each wave of tech has sparked fears of brain rot. But the problem isn’t our ability to focus—it’s what we’re focusing on.
by Daniel Immerwahr via The New Yorker on January 20, 2025
CIA memo about LSD use.

CIA Behavior Control Experiments Focus of New Scholarly Collection

Agency sought drugs and behavior control techniques to use in “special interrogations” and offensive operations.
by Michael Evans via National Security Archive on December 23, 2024
A younger person's hand holding the hand of an older person in bed.

A Good Death: The Modern Hospice Movement

Cicely Saunders realized that preparing for a good death is the first step in providing one.
by Jessi Benson via Nursing Clio on November 13, 2024
Illustrations of a skeleton and an angel in a book.

This 19th-Century ‘Toy Book’ Used Science to Prove That Ghosts Were Simply an Illusion

“Spectropia” demystified the techniques used by mediums who claimed they could speak to the dead, revealing the “absurd follies of Spiritualism.”
by Vanessa Armstrong via Smithsonian on October 29, 2024
John Mack speaking on the Oprah Winfrey Show, with a tagline that reads "John Mack, M.D., Harvard Psychiatrist Who Believes Patients Were Abducted By Aliens."

John E. Mack and the Unbelievable UFO Truth

The controversial career of John E. Mack, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist who wrote best-selling books on UFO abduction.
by Michael J. Socolow via Los Angeles Review of Books on September 21, 2024
A stone sign that reads "Gateways Hospital and Community Mental Health Center."

How Louis Ziskind Helped Deinstitutionalize Mental Healthcare

A community health center in Los Angeles that sought to get patients back into the community.
by Alex Sayf Cummings via Nursing Clio on September 4, 2024
partner

An Early Case of Impostor Syndrome

Why were so many early European books laden with self-deprecation? Blame genre conventions.
by Katherine Churchill via HNN on August 27, 2024
Doodles, flourishes and scribbles drawn by George Washington.

Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing

Humans have doodled for as long as they have written and drawn, but psychoanalysis began to imagine the doodle as a key to understanding the unconscious mind.
by Polly Dickson via The Paris Review on July 17, 2024
Two women protesting Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh

Disposable Heroes

Christine Blasey Ford’s memoir captures the hazards of “coming forward.”
by Moira Donegan via Bookforum on July 2, 2024
An eye in the shape of the United States.

The Weaponization of Storytelling

The American public is more susceptible than ever to skewed narratives.
by Colin Dickey via The New Republic on June 27, 2024
Man and woman testing buttons on machine at Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory

Tomorrow People

For the entire 20th century, it had felt like telepathy was just around the corner. Why is that especially true now?
by Roger Luckhurst via Aeon on June 3, 2024
A copy of "On Death and Dying" with a magnifying glass in front of it.

Lost in the Five Stages of Grief

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying” sparked a revolution in end-of-life care. But soon she began to deny mortality altogether.
by Colin Dickey via The New Republic on April 24, 2024
A man stands before four doorways with cryptic letters on them.

Sorting the Self

The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.
by Christopher Yates via The Hedgehog Review on March 3, 2024
Nixon signing the 26th amendment.
partner

America’s Age-Based Laws Are Archaic

Our age-based laws have never made sense. With modern science, they make even less sense.
by Holly N. S. White via Made By History on February 28, 2024
Betty Friedan circa 1975.

What Betty Friedan Knew

Judge the author of the “Feminine Mystique” not by the gains she made, but by her experience.
by Hermione Hoby via The New Republic on December 1, 2023
Betty and Barney Hill praying.

From Civil Rights Liberals to New Age Conspiracy Theorists

What Betty and Barney Hill's alien abduction story reveals about America.
by Susannah Crockford via Religion Dispatches on September 12, 2023
Betty Friedan

The Abandonment of Betty Friedan

What does the academy have against the mother of second-wave feminism?
by Rachel Shteir via The Chronicle of Higher Education on September 11, 2023
Bessel van der Kolk.

How Trauma Became America’s Favorite Diagnosis

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives.
by Danielle Carr via Intelligencer on July 31, 2023
Martha Hodes (left) and her sister, Catherine, joint passport photo.

The Historian Who Lost Her Memory of a Hijacking

At 12 years old, Martha Hodes was on board a hijacked plane and was taken hostage for a week. How did she forget much of the experience?
by Jacob Bacharach via The New Republic on July 25, 2023
Figurine of man with his head in a kiln (from the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The Corporatization of Creativity

Our ways of thinking about thinking are a product of postwar business culture.
by Charlie Tyson via The Chronicle of Higher Education on July 24, 2023
A young girl in profile with syringes looming behind and a reddish, gritty spiral behind

New Docs Link CIA to Medical Torture of Indigenous Children and Black Prisoners

While we may never know the full truth, we owe it to those harmed and killed to illuminate their stories.
by Orisanmi Burton via Truthout on June 22, 2023
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