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Brian Gallagher on Muck Rack

Brian Gallagher

Berkeley
As seen in: Medium, OneZero, Pocket, Cincinnati Enquirer, Santa Barbara Independent, Nautilus, RealClear Science, The Daily Nexus, WFXR-TV (Roanoke, VA), WPHL-TV (Philadelphia, PA) and
Writer-editor. Co-author of “Are We Ready for Mars?” tinyurl.com/yr8wb36x. Previously @nautilusmag. Here to take everything seriously 100% of the time.
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Larry David and the Game Theory of Anonymous Donations

Larry David and the Game Theory of Anonymous Donations

Nautilus — In a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode from 2007, Larry David and his wife Cheryl and their friends attend a ceremony to celebrate his public donation to the National Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental advocacy group. Little does he know that the actor Ted Danson, his arch-frenemy, also donated money, but anonymously.
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The Case for Making Cities Out of Wood

The Case for Making Cities Out of Wood

Nautilus — Last month, Dan Doctoroff, the C.E.O. of Sidewalk Labs, Google's sibling company under Alphabet, answered a question about what his company "actually does" during a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session, replying, "The short answer is: We want to build the first truly 21st-century city."
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Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will

Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will

Nautilus — It's not that James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute's Digital Ethics Lab (motto: "Every Bit as Good"), had a "God, what I have I done?" moment during his time at Google. But it did occur to him that something had gone awry.
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Brain Damage Saved His Music

Brain Damage Saved His Music

Nautilus — Five years ago, when neurosurgeon Marcelo Galarza saw images from jazz guitarist Pat Martino's cerebral MRI, he was astonished. "I couldn't believe how much of his left temporal lobe had been removed," he said. Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of malformed veins and arteries.
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Are Suicide Bombings Really Driven by Ideology?

Are Suicide Bombings Really Driven by Ideology?

Nautilus — Harvey Whitehouse doesn't like how New Atheists like Richard Dawkins make religion out to be a mere "set of propositions" amounting to a "failed science." In a 2013 YouTube video, Whitehouse-the director of the Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford-strolls through a park and says, "Clearly religion is not just that."
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Your Brain Can't Handle the Moon

Your Brain Can't Handle the Moon

Nautilus — What is this new theory?" the long-retired New York University cognitive psychologist, Lloyd Kaufman, asked me. We were sitting behind the wooden desk of his cozy home office. He had a stack of all his papers on the moon illusion, freshly printed, waiting for me on the adjacent futon.
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The Case for More Intellectual Humility

The Case for More Intellectual Humility

Nautilus — I can remember, almost a decade ago, when I was convinced out of my "Young-Earth" Creationism. It was almost a process of de-radicalization. During high school I was a generic Christian, but then some friends suggested I watch a video of a pastor online and, well, you can guess the rest.
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The Simple Logical Puzzle That Shows How Illogical We Are

The Simple Logical Puzzle That Shows How Illogical We Are

Nautilus — In the 1960s, the English psychologist Peter Wason devised an experiment that would revolutionize his field. This clever puzzle, known as the "Wason selection task," is often claimed to be "the single most investigated experimental paradigm in the psychology of reasoning," in the words of one textbook author.
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The Case Against Lectures

The Case Against Lectures

Nautilus — Getting "lectured" is rarely, if ever, a pleasant experience. You're being told what to do and think, or even chastised. Don't lecture me, we like to say. Having to "attend" a lecture, though-that's not so bad, depending on the speaker. Hell, on the go, I listen to lectures willingly.
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Why Women Choose Differently at Work

Why Women Choose Differently at Work

Nautilus — If you were to predict the future on the basis of school achievement alone, the world would be a matriarchy." Susan Pinker, who wrote that sentence almost a decade ago in her book The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women, and the Real Gender Gap, could make the same claim today: A 2014 meta-analysis found that the "female advantage in school marks has remained stable in the data retrieved (from 1914 to 2011)."
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