In case you were under the delusion that the world of literary publishing was infinitely better back in the day, here's a mortifying reminiscence by the legendary editor Robert Giroux, who died Friday. Giroux has promised J.D. Salinger he (that is... read more

This was another day when I had to go off to Minneapolis to run an important errand, and as long as I was there, I went on Air America for an hour. There I am, with Mike Haubrich and Lynn Fellman, talking about the Galápagos. The recording ... read more

Human beings are terrible, on the whole, at working out how likely it is that something will occur. We are prone to describe things as miraculous or beyond any chance occurrence when in fact they are statistically quite likely. Why is this? Micha... read more

Popping up on Patrick Hannan's programme (34 minutes in) to talk about philosophy and the art of living. Listen again facility available here for a week after broadcast. read more

Sengupta et al. (2006) proposed using the median observed allele in a Y-STR locus as an estimate of the ancestral allele in that locus. The average squared distance using the median allele tends to be lower (on average) than if the real ancestral ... read more