It’s pretty much everything. — Pamela Paul was the gatekeeper for years of which books the New York Times reviewed. Based on her turns as columnist since leaving that post, her outlook on the world is alarmingly circumscribed within a rather ungenerously proportioned lens for someone who held that post. The opinion essays she attempts…

My deliberate and successful play to get suspended from checkmark Twitter — If you followed me on Twitter, you can go to my former profile and find that I’m no longer @ejwillingham, where I have spent the last 13 years (I joined in September of 2009). It was no accident that I’m gone, even though the reason is that I was permanently…

Why this century’s children are having an unprecedented adolescence — Adolescence is our longest period of brain development and, as those of us who survived it can attest, can be quite a wild ride. That’s been a constant for every age cohort since humans existed. Despite efforts to define generations of the 20th century as separate monoliths — Boomers, Generation…

We should be teaching our children well that discomfort isn’t always disaster — The scene is so tense, it’s almost impossible to watch. Not because it’s gory or dark or even suspenseful but because you’re dying of embarrassment on behalf of the characters. But even as you can barely stand the discomfiture, you’re also laughing, at first a little, then a lot, and…

Bragging about armed faculty in our public schools sends a lasting message that will only perpetuate harms — The above image* is a screenshot of a post that bubbled up in my Facebook feeds like noxious mud from the swamps of Texas politics. There are a lot of things to say about it, but here, because I focus on adolescence, I want to highlight why signs like this…

Growing old with Jane Austen means new perspectives on characters we once loved to hate On a first read of Pride and Prejudice at perhaps age 12, girls like me probably find themselves relating profoundly to Elizabeth “Lizzy” Bennet. She’s a reader, she loves her sister (well, at least one…

Piggensteins imply that mostly dead could mean slightly alive. — In 2019, researchers took the brains of pigs slaughtered in an abattoir and bathed them in an elixir they dubbed BrainEx. The scientists reported that cells in these hours-dead brains woke up, showed signs of life, and started to behave pretty much like normal, living cells. …

It took me more than 30 years to figure mine out — This week on Twitter, #Neurodivergent was trending for me, which isn’t a big surprise, as I’ve spent many years of my life writing on that subject and have a wide circle of acquaintances with personal interest in it. It is one of those hashtags that makes you hesitate, wondering whether…

With cameos by Vladimir Lenin and Sigmund Freud, and bleak endings under the dark shadow of the Nazi regime. — [Content warning for description of suicide and mentions of euthanasia and the Holocaust.] If you’ve ever had an electroencephalogram, or EEG, you’ve undergone a common technique with roots tracing back almost 200 years to 19th-century Europe. …