Word: gopnik
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...harmed in the making of this motion picture." That statement is open to dispute, since most of the film's characters are Jewish - residents of suburban Minneapolis in 1967 - and just about all of them, it seems, are out to harm the Coens' hapless hero, college physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), either intentionally or just by ignoring his mostly mute cries for help...
Sure, they may while away their days eating, sleeping and soiling diapers. But Alison Gopnik says it's high time that babies got some respect. In her new book, The Philosophical Baby, the University of California, Berkeley, psychologist says modern research is revolutionizing our understanding of the first years of life, revealing early childhood to be a frenzied period of intellectual, emotional and moral development. "Any child will put the most productive scientist to shame," she writes. Gopnik spoke with TIME about the origins of creativity, the "boondoggle" of educational toys and discerning right and wrong during this uniquely fertile...
TIME: You say that for most of history, babies were seen as "vegetables with a few reflexes." What's going on in a baby's mind that we didn't appreciate before? Gopnik: If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are. (See pictures of pregnant...
...that scientists are all a bunch of Darwin-worshippers. It’s bad enough that books have just been published with titles like Darwin’s Sacred Cause by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, assessing Darwin’s abolitionist tendencies, or Angels and Ages, by Adam Gopnik, which compares Darwin to Lincoln. Worse, these views are often evangelized in the popular press. Even something as seemingly innocuous as putting a fish on your car with the word “Darwin” written inside it may suggest to the uniformed that Darwin is somehow the Jesus...
Rather than a biographical re-hash - wise, for possibly only Jesus bests Lincoln in the number of published books devoted to a single person - Gopnik offers a meditation on each man's most literary qualities: Lincoln's deceptively simple legalistic language and Darwin's crystalline powers of observation. And what could have been a gimmick (a book timed to twin bicentennials is as close as historical biographies get to a home run) becomes something more, a learned treatise that worships learning. Gone is the overly twee writing of Gopnik's memoir-inflected works (Paris to the Moon, Through the Children...