Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being

Why are so many humans religious? Why do we daydream, imagine, and hope? Philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and historians have offered explanations for centuries, but their accounts often ignore or even avoid human evolution. Evolutionary scientists answer with proposals for why ritual, religion, and faith make sense as adaptations to past challenges or as by-products of our hyper-complex cognitive capacities. But what if the focus on religion is too narrow? Renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes argues that the capacity to be religious is actually a small part of a larger and deeper human capacity to believe. Why believe in religion, economies, love? Fuentes employs evolutionary, neurobiological, and anthropological evidence to argue that belief — the ability to commit passionately and wholeheartedly to an idea — is central to the human way of being in the world.

The premise of the book is that believing is our ability to draw on our range of cognitive and social resources, our histories and experiences, and combine them with our imagination. It is the power to think beyond what is here and now in order to see and feel and know something — an idea, a vision, a necessity, a possibility, a truth — that is not immediately present to the senses, and then to invest, wholly and authentically, in that “something” so that it becomes one’s reality. The point is that beliefs and belief systems permeate human neurobiologies, bodies, and ecologies, and structure and shape our daily lives, our societies, and the world around us. We are human, therefore we believe, and this book tells us how we came to be that way.

Shermer and Fuentes also discuss:

• what it means to “believe” something (belief in evolution or the Big Bang is different from belief in progressive taxes or affirmative action),
• evolution and how beliefs are formed…and why,
• evolution of awe, wonder, aesthetic sense, beauty, art, music, dance, etc. (adaptation or exaptation/spandrel?),
• evolution of spirituality, religion, belief in immortality,
• Were Neanderthals human in the “belief” sense?
• human niche and the evolution of symbolism/language,
• evolution of theory of mind,
• how to infer symbolic meaning from archaeological artifacts,
• components of belief: augmented cognition and neurobiology, intentionality, imagination, innovation, compassion and intensive reliance on others, meaning-making,
• dog domestication and human self-domestication,
• Göbekli Tepe and the underestimation of ancient peoples’ cognitive capacities,
• the development of property, accumulation of goods, inequality, and social hierarchy,
• gender role specialization,
• monogamy and polyamory, gender and sex, and continuum vs. binary thinking,
• violence and warfare,
• political and economic systems of belief, and
• love as belief.

Agustín Fuentes is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is an active public scientist, a well-known blogger, lecturer, tweeter, and an explorer for National Geographic. Fuentes received the Inaugural Communication & Outreach Award from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Inconvenient Truths About Fat Loss

by Tom Venuto from the Burn The Fat E-Zine 

Fat loss can be frustrating at times. You lose fat more slowly than you think you should, your progress stalls completely, it feels like your metabolism is broken, you do cardio but it doesn’t help, or life gets in the way. Some things that interfere with your fat loss efforts are out of your control. In many cases, the frustration is self-inflicted because you don’t yet understand or are not yet willing to admit the truth about how fat loss and human bodies work.

Sometimes the facts are unpleasant. There are truths you may not want to hear, but they’re things you need to hear. As Carl Sagan once said, “Better the hard truth than a comforting fantasy.” When you learn the truth about fat loss, and accept it, you still might not be happy about it, but its only then that real change starts to happen.
In this post, you’ll learn some of the most inconvenient fat loss truths. If you understand, accept, and respond to these in the right way, you will break through any past barriers and forge on to the lean body you want.

1. Too much healthy food can lead to weight gain: Fat loss happens when you achieve a calorie deficit. Yet not all diets ask you to count calories. Some diets are based on the premise that all you have to do to lose weight is to eat certain foods – namely the unprocessed, nutrient-dense foods, and avoid others – the processed, nutrient-sparse foods.

Guidelines urging you to eat unprocessed foods are well-intentioned on two levels. One is because less processed foods make you healthier. The other is because processed foods are usually more calorie-dense and hyper-palatable, so focusing on eating healthier foods usually does help you control calories, and that helps with fat loss.

However, there are always many frustrated dieters screaming, “I’m eating healthy, but not losing any weight!” Why does this happen?  Because you’re eating too much healthy food! Healthy foods are not calorie-free. Too much of anything, even healthy foods, will get stored as fat.You don’t get an unlimited all-you-can-eat pass. Ever.

For some reason, this fact does not register in the brains of many health food eaters.
Many foods with a reputation for being healthy, especially fats like avocado, natural peanut butter and olive oil, are incredibly calorie dense and easily overeaten into surplus levels. Making it worse, the popularity of keto-type diets has normalized eating more fat, including things like coconut oil, which is perceived by some people as healthy but adds hundreds of extra calories to their diets in a snap. 

The truth is, eating healthy foods doesn’t get you lean. Eating healthy foods gets you healthy. A sustained calorie deficit gets you lean.

2. You eat more calories than you think: Almost everyone eats more than they think. Why? Because almost all of us are bad at estimating how many calories are in our food. It’s very difficult to eyeball a food portion and correctly guess the calories (darn near impossible in restaurants). The only sure-fire solution to underestimating calorie intake is to weigh and measure food and track the calories and macros (protein, carbs, and fats).

In a NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) study which found that so-called “diet resistant” people did not have slow metabolisms, they also discovered the real cause for the lack of weight loss: The subjects underestimated their calorie intake by 47%! That’s not a minor mistake – that’s a massive “make you or break you” kind of mistake! The researchers said, “The failure of some obese subjects to lose weight while eating a diet they report as low in calories is due to an energy intake substantially higher than reported, not to an abnormality in thermogenesis.”

To be fair, we should acknowledge that there are some clinical explanations for short term diet resistance. For example, undiagnosed and untreated thyroid disease could cause difficulty with losing weight. Certain medications can stimulate appetite or decrease calorie burning. And there are a handful of medical conditions that can hinder fat loss efforts.

In this study however, people with these issues were excluded, so these exceptions were ruled out. Lack of weight loss wasn’t caused by slow metabolism, thyroid problems, or medication, it was caused by eating too much food.

It’s important to know that we’re not saying frustrated dieters are dishonest about how much they eat. They’re simply not aware that they eat so much because it’s so hard to guess the calories in meals, and so easy to lose track over time.

3. You burn less calories than you think you do: The overestimation of calories burned is just as alarming as the underestimation of calories eaten. In the NEJM study, the subjects not only under-estimated their food intake by 47%, they over-estimated how many calories they burned by 51%! Think for a minute about the impact of both put together.

In a different study, researchers from York University in Toronto had a group of test subjects exercise on a treadmill for 25 minutes at either a moderate or intense level. After the exercise, they were asked to estimate the number of calories they burned and create a meal containing that many calories.

This study was also cleverly designed in the way they used different groups, including some individuals who were not trying to lose weight. There were four types of participants in the study:
1. Normal weight
2. Overweight
3. Trying to lose weight
4. Not trying to lose weight

Every subject did a poor job trying to estimate calories burned, with one group (overweight, not trying to lose weight), doing a terrible job: They overestimated their calories burned by 72%!

The subjects who were trying to lose weight did better, but still failed to accurately estimate their calories burned and eaten. In all the participants from all four groups, there was a range of calories burned estimation error between 280 and 702 calories per day.

4. One weekend of overeating can cancel out a whole week of dieting and training: Most people believe the cliché, “You can’t out-train a lousy diet” is more or less true. At the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, a study was designed to find out whether a “lousy diet” on weekends specifically, was causing weight loss failure.
Prior to this study, the best evidence for weekend eating causing fat loss plateaus or weight gain, came from the National Weight control Registry (NWCR). NWCR research had found an association between lower weekday to weekend diet consistency with weight loss relapse.

People who maintained the same eating patterns on weekends as weekdays were more likely to maintain their weight during the subsequent year. The newer study was a randomized controlled trial with a large sample size, and it ran for a whole year. It measured compliance to diet and exercise during the week as compared to the weekend, as well as changes in body weight during the week as compared to the weekend.

Over the entire 52 weeks, what they discovered was that both test groups – a calorie restricted group and an exercise group – successfully adhered to their calorie deficit on the weekdays. On the weekends, however, calorie restricted participants stopped losing weight and exercise participants actually gained weight.

The study was the first controlled trial to confirm what the NWCR had reported observationally and what we always suspected: weight gain does happen on the weekends more than the weekdays and it’s because of increased calorie intake on the weekends. Things go awry because most people have different eating schedules, patterns or habits on the weekends than on weekdays.

Calorie intake was highest on Saturdays – about 236 calories more than on weekdays, mostly from fatty foods. A couple hundred calories more on Saturday doesn’t seem like much, and of course it’s possible to eat more on some days than others and still have a weekly deficit.

But the excess calories most people eat on weekends are not a part of deliberate, controlled refeeds, built into a weekly plan to maintain an overall deficit. The weekend excess most people eat is overlooked and adds up over time.

Just this barely noticeable increase in weekend food intake could cause a weight gain of nearly 9 pounds if you didn’t catch it and let it go on unchecked all year long. Of course, some people indulge even more than others from Friday night through Sunday, so the fat gain could be even higher. Note that weekends come around 52 times a year.

Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

 Apollo’s Arrow offers a riveting account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as it swept through American society in 2020, and of how the recovery will unfold in the coming years. Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, bestselling author, physician, sociologist, and public health expert Nicholas A. Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague — an experience that is paradoxically uncommon to the vast majority of humans who are alive, yet deeply fundamental to our species. Featuring new, provocative arguments and vivid examples ranging across medicine, history, sociology, epidemiology, data science, and genetics, Apollo’s Arrowenvisions what happens when the great force of a deadly germ meets the enduring reality of our evolved social nature.

Shermer and Christakis discuss:

• the replication crisis in social science and medicine,
• determining causality in science and medicine,
• how we know smoking causes cancer and HIV causes AIDS, but vaccines do not cause autism and cell phones do not cause cancer,
• randomized controlled trials and why they can’t be done to answer many medical questions,
• natural experiments and the comparative method of testing hypotheses (e.g., comparing different countries differing responses to Covid-19),
• the hindsight bias and the curse of knowledge in judging responses to pandemics after the fact,
• looking back to January 2020, what should we have done?,
• comparing Covid-19 to the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, and other pandemics,
• bacteria vs. viruses, coronaviruses and their effects, and why viruses are so much harder to treat than bacteria,
• Bill Gates’ TED talk warning in 2015 and why we didn’t heed it,
• treatments: hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, Vitamin D.

How civilization will change:

• medical: coronavirus is here to stay — herd immunity naturally and through vaccines,
• personal and public health: handshakes, hugs, and other human contact; masks, social distancing, hygiene,
• long run healthier society (e.g., body temperatures have decreased from 98.6 to 97.9),
• economics and business,
• travel, conferences, meetings,
• marriage, dating, sex, and home life,
• entertainment, vacations, bars, and restaurants,
• education and schools,
• politics and society (and a better understanding of freedom and why it is restricted),
• from pandemic to endemic.

Nicholas A. Christakis is a physician and sociologist who explores the ancient origins and modern implications of human nature. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, where he is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, in the Departments of Sociology, Medicine, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistics and Data Science, and Biomedical Engineering. He is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, the co-author of Connected, and the author of Blueprint.

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How A City Of 2.5 Million Ensures Everyone Has Access To Healthy Food

from “The Optimist Daily” e-zine

In a nation characterized by abundance, it’s baffling that some 10.5 percent of households in the US suffer from food insecurity. This fact becomes even more stupefying when we consider that an estimated 30 to 40 percent of America’s food supply winds up in the trash. With this in mind, we ask the question: how can we ensure that everyone in America has access to healthy food? To help us find an answer, let’s take a trip down south to the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil.

Belo Horizonte is a city of 2.5 million located roughly 275 miles north of Rio de Janeiro. It is an industrial and technological hub that has stark socioeconomic divisions, including high rates of poverty, which is not so different from many cities in the US. Despite this, Belo Horizonte has managed to effectively eliminate hunger in the city thanks to a pioneering food security system that requires less than 2 percent of the city’s annual budget.

In 1993, the city enacted a municipal law that established a citizen’s right to food and created a commission of government officials, farmers, labor leaders, and others, tasked with a mandate to “provide access to food as a measure of social justice.”

As described by Yes! Magazine, Belo Horizonte’s food security system now comprises 20 interconnected programs that approach food security in sustainable ways. They connect food-producers directly to consumers (eliminating retailer markup); offer healthy, fresh food at fixed, low costs at several restaurants popular, or “popular (public) restaurants”; provide food directly to schools, daycare centers, clinics, and nursing homes, shelters, and charitable organizations; establish farmers’ markets and stands to allow farmers to sell their goods directly to residents; regulate food prices for 25 specific items, which must be sold at 20-50 percent below market price; create food banks to distribute unused produce from those markets; and establish community and school gardens, in addition to providing nutrition education.

What’s particularly impressive about the food security program is that it has managed to keep feeding its people despite the fact that Brazil has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, which only increased the number of people in need of fresh, healthy food. Building upon existing infrastructure, the city increased the number of open-air markets and supported restaurants that could help distribute food to those in need.

As mentioned earlier, Belo Horizonte’s food security program only requires 2 percent of the city’s annual budget, a relatively small amount considering both the health and financial benefits that come with feeding residents with healthy food. And by taking care of citizens’ food needs, those same citizens can then use the money they would have been spent on food to take care of other basic needs, which could be an absolute life-saver during the coronavirus pandemic.

No Purveyor Of Unhealthy Foods Wants The Public To Know The Truth

by Michael Greger, M.D., from the Nutrition Facts e-zine

In 2011, Denmark introduced the world’s first tax on saturated fat. “After only 15 months, however, the fat tax was abolished,” due to massive pressure from farming and food company interests. “Public health advocates are weak in tackling the issues of corporate power. A well-used approach for alcohol, tobacco, and, more recently, food-related corporate interests is to shift the focus away from health. This involves reframing a fat or soft drinks tax as an issue of consumer rights and a debate over the role of the state in ‘nannying’ or restricting people’s choices.” I discuss this in my video The Food Industry Wants the Public Confused About Nutrition.

“The ‘Nanny State’ is a term that is usually used in a pejorative way to discourage governments from introducing legislation or regulation that might undermine the power or actions of industry or individuals…Public health advocacy work is regularly undermined by the ‘Nanny State’ phrase.” But those complaining about the governmental manipulation of people’s choices hypocritically tend to be fine with corporations doing the same thing. One could argue that “public health is being undermined by the ‘Nanny Industry’…[that] uses fear of government regulation to maintain its own dominance, to maintain its profits and to do so at a significant financial and social cost to the community and to public health.”

The tobacco industry offers the classic example, touting “personal responsibility,” which has a certain philosophical appeal. As long as people understand the risks, they should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies. Now, some argue that risk-taking affects others, but if you have the right to put your own life at risk, shouldn’t you have the right to aggrieve your parents, widow your spouse, and orphan your children? Then, there’s the social cost argument. People’s bad decisions can cost the society as a whole, whose tax dollars, facilities, and human resources have to care for them. “The independent, individualist motorcyclist, helmetless and free on the open road, becomes the most dependent of individuals in the spinal injury ward.”

But, for the sake of argument, let’s forget these spillover effects, the so-called externalities. If someone understands the hazards, shouldn’t they be able to do whatever they want? Well, “first, it  assumes individuals can access accurate and balanced information relevant to their decisions…but deliberate industry interference has often created situations where consumers have access only to incomplete and inaccurate information…For decades, tobacco companies successfully suppressed or undermined scientific evidence of smoking’s dangers and down-played the public health concerns to which this information gave rise.” Don’t worry your little head, said the corporations. Yet, “Analyses of documents…have revealed decades of deception and manipulation by the tobacco industry and confirmed deliberate targeting of…children.” Indeed, it has “marketed and sold [its] lethal products with zeal…and without regard for the human tragedy….”

“The tobacco industry’s deliberate strategy of challenging scientific evidence undermines smokers’ ability to understand the harms smoking poses” and, as such, undermines the whole concept that smoking is a fully informed choice. “Tobacco companies have denied smokers truthful information…yet held smokers [accountable] for incurring diseases that will cause half of them to die prematurely. In contexts such as these, government intervention is vital to protect consumers from predatory industries….”

Is the food industry any different? “The public is bombarded with information and it is hard to tell which is true, which is false and which is merely exaggerated. Foods are sold without clarity about the nutritional content or harmful effects.” Remember how the food industry spent a billion dollars making sure the easy-to-understand traffic-light labeling system on food never saw the light of day and was replaced by indecipherable labeling? That’s ten times more money than the drug industry spends on lobbying in the United States. Its in the food industry’s interest to have the public confused about nutrition.

How confused are we about nutrition? “Head Start teachers are responsible for providing nutrition education to over 1 million low-income children annually…” When 181 Head Start teachers were put to the test, only about 4 out of the 181 answered at least four of the five nutrition knowledge questions correctly. Most, for example, could not correctly answer the question, “What has the most calories: protein, carbohydrate, or fat?” Not a single teacher could answer all five nutrition questions correctly. While they valued nutrition education, 54 percent “agreed that it was hard to know which nutrition information to believe,” and the food industry wants to keep it that way. A quarter of the teachers did not consume any fruits or vegetables the previous day, though half did have french fries and soda, and a quarter consumed fried meat the day before. Not surprisingly, 55 percent of the teachers were not just overweight but obese.

When even the teachers are confused, something must be done. No purveyor of unhealthy products wants the public to know the truth. “An interesting example comes from the US ‘Fairness Doctrine’ and the tobacco advertising experience of the 1960s. Before tobacco advertising was banned from television in the US, a court ruling in 1967 required that tobacco companies funded one health ad about smoking for every four tobacco TV advertisements they placed. Rather than face this corrective advertising, the tobacco industry took their own advertising off television.” They knew they couldn’t compete with the truth. Just “the threat of corrective advertising even on a one-to-four basis was sufficient to make the tobacco companies withdraw their own advertising.” They needed to keep the public in the dark.

The trans fat story is an excellent example of this. For more on that, see my videos Controversy Over the Trans Fat Ban.

More tobacco industry parallels can be found in Big Food Using the Tobacco Industry Playbook, American Medical Association Complicity with Big Tobacco, and How Smoking in 1959 Is Like Eating in 2016.

The Measure of a Life: Carl Sagan and the Science of Biography

 What is the measure of a life when it is gone? A newspaper obit? A magazine story? A potted television biography? How shall we capture the essence of that life? A list of accomplishments? Highlights and lowlights? Interviews with family, friends, colleagues, and critics? A womb-to-tomb narrative? And if that life was an epochal-shaping life, how is a contemporary biographer to put that life in perspective before the epoch is over? What tools should we use? Oral history interviews? Demographic and statistical data? Document analysis? What fields should we consult? Psychology? Sociology? Cultural history? Does the measure of a life depend as much on who is doing the measuring as it does on the measured life itself? Can we even get to the true core of a person? Can there be a science of biography?

In this tribute to Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer ponders the question of what the measure of a life is once it has gone. And if that life was an epochal-shaping life, how is a contemporary biographer to put that life in perspective before the epoch is over?

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Veteran's Day - November 11, 2020

 

Happy Veteran's Day to all the other veterans out there.

Although we haven't always been looked upon with pride and admiration, I am pleased to see the sentiment has changed, and Americans recognize and respect the sense of duty we all willingly gave to keep our country alive and free.

It was a deep privilege to be a part of something so important.

Please review these flashback links of my Navy life and the hardship of your servicemen and women during the Vietnam War. They say a lot about the time. VF51, of which I played a part shows up in the videos. 

These provide you with a hint of what we did while we served.

These are now just distant memories, 

but they still stir some very strong emotions.

Thank you for being there.

Vought F-8 Crusader

Bon Homme Richard CVA 31 ATTACK carrier 1970 Vietnam

McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II

F-4 video

Vietnam: Flight Deck Ops-Life aboard an Aircraft Carrier

USS Coral Sea (CV-43) - The Ageless Warrior

The most terrifying sounds of the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War Explained In 25 Minutes | Vietnam War Documentary

 Veteran's Day tribute

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

This lecture was recorded on October 6, 2010 as part of the Distinguished Science Lecture Series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society in California (1992–2015).

Richard Dawkins, discussing his book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, begins by explaining that all of his previous books naïvely assumed the fact of evolution, which meant that he never got around to laying out the evidence that evolution is true. Dawkins also came to realize that a disturbingly large percentage of the American and British public didn’t share his enthusiasm for evolution. In fact, they actively abhorred the idea, since it seemed to contradict the Bible and diminish the role of God. So Dawkins decided to write a book for these history-deniers, in which he would dispassionately demonstrate the truth of evolution beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt. If Charles Darwin walked into a 21st-century bookstore and wanted to know how his theory had fared, this is the book he should pick up. As Darwin famously noted, “There is grandeur in this view of life.” What Dawkins demonstrates is that this view of life isn’t just grand: it’s also undeniably true.

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Break it Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union

The provocative thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t limited to the South or the 19^th century. It was there at our founding and has never gone away.

Investigative journalist Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the 13 colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town’s petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil.

From the “cold civil war” that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age. Shermer and Kreitner discuss:

• what happens if Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to leave,
• the possibility of the secession of California, Oregon and Washington,
• States rights vs. Federal power in issues like climate change, abortion, health care, etc.,
• how Native American tribes and nations governed themselves and what the colonists learned from them,
• how the 1^st colonial revolution was fought not to create a federation but to destroy one when Boston rebelled against the Crown-backed Dominion of New England,
• separatists movements throughout our history,
• Aaron Burr’s attempts to create a new nation he would head,
• spread of slavery to the west and Jefferson’s fear that it sounded like a “fire bell in the night,”

• why John Quincy Adams introduced a petition demanding the dissolution of the U.S.:

  “If the day should ever come, (may Heaven avert it,) when the affection of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred, far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.”

• how Southern states initially sought to expand the union of slave holding states, not secession,
• why reconstruction failed,
• the Civil War of the 1960s,
• Brexit, Texit, and Calexit,
• Russia support for American secessionist movements,

• James Madison’s observation (in Federalist Paper No. 51) about the problem all human groups/tribes/nations must solve:

  “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Kreitner’s summation of America’s irrepressible conflict “The ‘irrepressible conflict’ was not just between North and South, freedom and slavery; it reflected something even deeper. The truly ‘irrepressible’ conflict was between union and disunion, whose forces bringing American together and those tearing them apart.”

Richard Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation. He is the author of Booked: A Traveler’s Guide to Literary Locations Around the World. A graduate of McGill University, he has also written for The New York Times, Slate, Salon, The Baffler, Raritan, The Forward, and the Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

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