Peter Murmann

Atul Gawande, a doctor and staff writer of the New Yorker, has already received numerous awards for this writing. Now he has penned in the New Yorker (August 2, 2010) a report on how American medicine handles the final stages of our lives. This is the most difficult story I have read in many years, [Read More]

Here are some useful tips for middle aged people on how to get their brain to perform better. By BARBARA STRAUCH (NY Times) I LOVE reading history, and the shelves in my living room are lined with fat, fact-filled books. There’s “The Hemingses of Monticello,” about the family of Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress; there’s “House of Cards,” [Read More]

The NY Times published today a facinating article on how scientists have developed a new interpretatin what dreams are for. A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain (By BENEDICT CAREY) It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. [Read More]

I have been waiting for a piece on the origins of music for a long time. Read this interesting report in the Economist on the scientific debates on why most of us like music so much. Biologists are addressing one of humanity’s strangest attributes, its all-singing, all-dancing culture. “IF MUSIC be the food of love, play on, [Read More]

One of the reason John F. Kennedy was so popular were his great looks. I can understand why evangelical Republicans are ecstatic about the nomination of Palin. But why she is popular in the entire Republican party cannot be explained by her record. I suspect her good looks and her outgoing personality are an important [Read More]

What a finale! A few days ago after Hillary Clinton gave her magnificent speech, I worried that Obama speech would appear anticlimatic. But he outperformed everyone else at the Cconvention and reminded us why he is the person to lead America forward. Even readers of the Wall Street Journal agreed that he gave a fantastic [Read More]

This is one of DAVID BROOKS’S best columns. He has done a lot of reading for you to be able to write about a revolution in our understanding of our brain and what this means for our view of the meaning of life. Enjoy. In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called In this [Read More]

I have been improving my diet over the past five years. But the new scientific recommendations prompted me to re-evaluate my eating habits. I did not know that processed meet like salami is so bad for you while red meat properly cooked is healthy. Click on “More” to see what foods you should eat or [Read More]

Ray Fisman filed this interesting report in Slate:When economists began broadly applying their theories of rational choice-making, love and marriage were among the first areas they colonized. Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker laid the foundations back in 1973 with his two-part article “A Theory of Marriage.” Becker imagined society as an immense cocktail party with [Read More]