Sleep is good, but when, how, where, how much? Matthew Wolf-Meyer has a new book, an ethnography of sleep, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life, that is amazing to read. The favorite bit of wisdom I heard about sleep types was that some people are popcorn and others are flowers. Popcorn people POP! awake Continue reading…
Coffee has amazing health benefits in quantity and might help you see ghosts And The Atlantic agrees (Dec 2012): The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like More ghosts Drink More Coffee – Live Longer… Here’s the link to the New England Journal of Medicine Study, “Association of Coffee Drinking with Total and Cause-Specific Continue reading…
We really don’t know what a body can do. Spinoza said this centuries ago and it is still true today. Writing a book about brain imaging I learned that we don’t even know how much of human life can be attributed to the brain (or genes). Training in massage therapy at the hands-on Davis Massage Continue reading…
Playing with gravity, exploring physics using bodies, finding the limits of attention and expanding them. Contact Improvisation may be a dance of improvising and partnering based on the physics of touch, balance, weight, momentum, flow and resistance. It tunes our senses to be ready to respond in an ever-shifting dialogue of movement. Sometimes quiet and Continue reading…
I volunteer at Yolo Hospice. It is a non-profit organization that helps those who have less than six months to live and want to have that time as comfortably as possible, often at home. I hadn’t known about hospice growing up, but the more I learned about the larger medical system we live in, the Continue reading…
STS as Equipment for Literature: Sitzfleisch Material Semiosis (draft for 4S talk for panel, “Get your theories up and running with lively machines” – comments welcome) the title is a variation on rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s brilliant piece, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” describing the uses of inspirational and self-help books, noting that most people read Continue reading…
This has been my mainstay form of doing and thinking ethnographically a connected and disconnected world. A reading of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2 in dialogue with Donna Haraway’s works and methods. Working through the former helps me unpack the process of Haraway’s inquisitive “implosion” method and some of its aims better. I describe this as Continue reading…
By showing us the human brain at work, PET (positron emission tomography) scans are subtly–and sometimes not so subtly–transforming how we think about our minds. Picturing Personhood follows this remarkable and expensive technology from the laboratory into the world and back. It examines how PET scans are created and how they are being called on Continue reading…
STS at UC Davis