Barbara J. King
Barbara J. King is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. With a long-standing research interest in primate behavior and human evolution, King has studied baboon foraging in Kenya and gorilla and bonobo communication at captive facilities in the United States.
Recently, she has taken up writing about animal emotion and cognition more broadly, including in bison, farm animals, elephants and domestic pets, as well as primates.
King's most recent book is How Animals Grieve (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Her article "When Animals Mourn" in the July 2013 Scientific American has been chosen for inclusion in the 2014 anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing. King reviews non-fiction for the Times Literary Supplement (London) and is at work on a new book about the choices we make in eating other animals. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in 2002.
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Investigative reporter Michael Moss explores how some food companies tweak their products to take advantage of evolved biology, creating room for novelty that triggers the brain to make us want more. -
Harvard University's Daniel Lieberman looks at exercise from an evolutionary point of view, concluding that we evolved to limit our physical activity where possible, saving it for survival activities. -
The anthropologist and physician teaches that the world needs not only medicine, but something more — a rejection of global racial inequalities and serious investment in the care of all people. -
Rebecca Wragg Sykes describes evidence showing that as innovative tool- and fire-makers, Neanderthals adapted to changing climates, adopted symbolic cultural practices and expressed profound emotions. -
David Allen Sibley's name is synonymous with his bird field guides. In researching this volume, he became convinced of something new: Birds make complex decisions and experience emotions. -
Combining the knowledge of a seasoned scientist and the skills of a good storyteller, the ecologist-author invites us to leave our cultural worlds and enter some animal ones to see just how they work.
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Understanding the lives of animals can illuminate our own — and those of loved adolescents too. But authors Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers at times push cross-species links too far.
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Charles King tells the story of Franz Boas' powerful challenge to racial science — and of how others like Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston contributed to that project.
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With details at once compelling and disturbing, geographer Jacob Shell describes the lives of the elephants of mountainous Myanmar and northeastern India that haul timber or transport people.
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The beauty of Robert Macfarlane's writing, and of the natural world it describes, is immense. His words also act as a warning, ensuring a recognition of human harms to the environment.
