After 13 happy years as a columnist at The Guardian newspaper, I’ve stopped. It was a joy and a privilege working with the editors there. (You can read all those old columns — more than 500 of them — on the Guardian web site, and find links and bits of extra information here on the Improbable […]
Category: Newspaper column
Our newspaper column — about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — that ran in The Guardian for 13 years.
The Tradition of Shoe-Throwing at Weddings
Shoe-throwing may now be mostly a political act. But not long ago, it was a common rite of marriage, writes James Crombie of Aberdeen, who has gathered some matrimonial footwear-hurling facts into a 24-page treatise called Shoe-Throwing at Weddings. This was in 1895, when readers may have empathised with Crombie’s opening thought: “Pelting a bride […]
The Great Attempt to Catalog All Fetishes (including the pacemaker fetish)
On 28 October 2004 we humans took a giant step towards cataloguing all of our sexual fetishes. An Italian/Swedish research team, led by Claudia Scorolli [pictured here] at the University of Bologna, downloaded data from hundreds of online fetish discussion groups and spent the next three years analysing their haul. Then they published a study in the […]
Be still my beating heart … smashed fingers, battered shins and fake murder
If you (yup, you) use a fake weapon to brutally beat a stranger, and then slit his throat, and then shoot him in the face, and then you assault a little baby, will your heart and blood pump like mad — even if you know that it’s all a trick and the man will suffer […]
People-calculating: open doors and closed doors
Whether one person holds a door open for another is not simply a question of etiquette, says a study by Joseph P Santamaria and David A Rosenbaum [pictured here] of Pennsylvania State University. No, they say. Nothing simple about it. Santamaria and Rosenbaum worked to pursue the answer through a tangle of belief, logic, probability, perception […]