Bering in Mind

A version of this piece originally appeared in Slate in 2018. “Suicide,” goes the popular expression, “is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” The provenance is murky, but the internet attributes the saying to 1980s media personality Phil Donahue.

This isn’t the type of thing you talk about in polite company, but here we are. Apparently, there are women out there—hundreds of thousands of them, if social media is anything to go by—who each bright new morning insert their fingers into their vaginas as though it were a secret box of perfume, and then delicately dab their wrists, necks, and behind their ears with this most intimate of scents.

There’s a longstanding tradition at New Zealand universities for academics to give an “Inaugural Professorial Lecture” upon being promoted to the rank of Full Professor. It’s a quaint ritual. Down here, the career pathway is Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Prof, and, finally, Full Prof, and they make a big deal if you don’t burn out or drop dead before you get to that last step.

This essay first appeared inWhy Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human, published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Long before I knew very much about anything regarding sex, I did what many young males do, which of course is to place an empty paper-towel roll over my penis and suck hopefully upon the cardboard end. Okay, perhaps not everyone does this; I was a little confused about the suction principle.

I’ve got some exciting news: my new book, The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson is available for preorder! It’s the story of Dr. Ian Stevenson, a brilliant psychiatrist who spent decades documenting cases of reincarnation, apparitions, and other strange phenomena—and my attempt to make sense of it all. This book took me to places I never imagined I’d go. Writing it was an incredible adventure in itself.

One of the more provocative ideas I’ve come across in evolutionary biology is the aptly named “sneaky f*cker hypothesis.” It was originally meant for alternate mating strategies in a subset of individuals of a species, such as how some males in the lizard species Uta stansburiana not only resemble females in size and coloration, but also in their behaviors. This presentation enables them to slip past larger, aggressive males and gain access to closely guarded females.

This essay first appeared inWhy Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human, published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Once, while in a drowsy, altitude-induced delirium thirty-five thousand feet somewhere over Iceland, I groped mindlessly for the cozy blue blanket poking out beneath my seat, only to realize—to my unutterable horror—that I was in fact tugging soundly on a wriggling, sock-covered big toe.

This article was originally published in Le Point on 07.09.2025 Here’s a rare bit of sex trivia you probably never expected to learn. Ready? Here it comes. Nearly half of all men (47.7% to be specific) between the ages of 18 and 60 report having ejaculated onto the face of another person over their lifetime.

This article was originally published in Le Point on 24.08.2025 I’ve never been into vulvas (vulvae?). Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against them, and some are in fact attached to the best people I know. (Apparently, anyway, it’s not as though I’ve asked to see their private parts. More on that shortly.) Others have literally borne witness to those great intellects and artists that have made my life—and those of so many others—bearable.

This article was originally published in Le Point on 17.08.2025 Among the cringe-worthy—and in retrospect slightly disturbing—decisions of my youth was, at the age of thirteen, selecting serial killer Ted Bundy for my classroom presentation on “culturally significant figures.” That he was, of course, but in the worst possible way.