Top Highlights

• had a vision of how much easier social justice work around scientific research might become if it were consistently evidence-based.
• But Galileo went much further than these men before him. Philosophically paving the way for the world as we now know it, Galileo actively argued for a bold new way of knowing, openly insisting that what mattered was not what the authorities—ancient or otherwise—said was true but what anyone with the right tools could show was true. As no one before...
• The mythical tales of Galileo told by artists like Bertolt Brecht hold him up as a scientific saint, someone who could see completely beyond himself. But as the biographer David Wootton has argued convincingly, Galileo was driven to defend Copernicanism in part because it satisfied his personal psychology: “If Galileo stuck with Copernicanism as th...
• Not long after we started communicating, Bo asked me—as she asked perfect strangers all the time—to help her change the medical system for treating intersex. At first I resisted. As I explained, I was just a historian, somebody who deals with the past, and a newly minted one at that.
• There was David Cameron Strachan, who as an adult had been diagnosed with Klinefelter’s syndrome (XXY chromosomes) and had been shot full of testosterone by a doctor who maybe had thought that upping his sex drive would turn David from gay to straight. (Instead, it had made David uncomfortably hairy and horny, and he’d headed right to the San Franc...