Piece written for Aeon on the Syndrome E hypothesis: "Is Neuroscience Getting Closer to Explaining Evil Behavior?"
Written for issue on "States of Mind" of Lapham’s Quarterly
About the restoration and redesign of a house in the Loire valley, for Architectural Digest.
Neuro-News
Response to the 2016 Edge Question: What do you consider the most interesting scientific news? What makes it important?
Written for Lapham´s Quarterly issue on "Flesh".
Written for New York Daily News after the Paris attacks of November 13th, 2015.
The Passage from Normal to Dark
A testimonial written for Politico on the day after the Paris attacks of November 13th.
Response to the 2015 Edge Foundation Annual Question: What do you think about machines that think?
An essay on nostalgia, for Indian Quarterly (issue 3:2, January-March 2015).
A review of John Adams´s opera A Flowering Tree, in Indian Quarterly, Vol 2, Issue 4.
As A Lute Out Of Tune: Robert Burton’s Melancholy
Piece written for The Public Domain Review.
Written for the "roundtable" blog of Lapham´s Quarterly.]
Written for issue n. 1 of Garage.
Response to the 2010 Edge Question: "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" Anthologized in the resulting book, and selected as one of 8 of the 100 responses in Der Spiegel
Written for issue 55 of Nexus on "Hope and Consolation".
Piece on the history of doctors and patients, written for Lapham´s Quarterly, "Medicine" issue (Fall 2009).
Piece on the history of personals for Lapham´s Quarterly, "Eros" issue (Winter 2009).
Given at a conference on the Philosophy of Wine at Pollenzo (Piemonte), in May 2008.
Written for the first issue of a new journal on the philosophy of wine, Tacuinum Vitineum.
Speech After Long Silence: Of Poetry and Consciousness
Delivered as invited speaker to the 2005 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize Reading, Poets´ House, New York City.
A response to some reactions to Passions and Tempers, written in July 2007.
Melancholy and Humoural Passions in Early Modernity
Published in a French translation as "La Mélancolie et les passions humorales au début de la modernité", in the catalogue of the exhibition on melancholy shown in Paris and Berlin in 2005-06.
Response to an online debate on Spiked: "Complementary and alternative medicine: Why is conventional medicine not enough?"
This was written shortly after the 2004 US elections.
Text-e: Le texte a l’heure de l’internet
From the online symposium text-e. Edited by Gloria Origgi and Noga Arikha. With contributions by Stefana Broadbent, Francesco Cara, Roberto Casati, Roger Chartier, Umberto Eco, Jason Epstein, Stevan Harnad, Bruno Patino, Dan Sperber, Theodore Zeldin.
Written in October 2005.
Piece about the Internet, written for Prospect Magazine, as a counterpart to the online symposium on the impact of the internet on texts, text-e.
Review of Kenan Malik, Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell us About Human Nature(London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000), published in the TLS (9 February 2001).
Review (unpublished) of Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain - and How It Changed the World (New York: Free Press, 2004), 366pp. Originally written for the NYRB.
Book review: Metaphors of Memory
Review of Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Published in the Economist, in the issue dated June 28th, 2001.
On Pellegrino Artusi, Italy’s Victorian chef
Essay (unpublished) about the Italian cookery classic, Pellegrino Artusi´s La scienza in cucina e l´arte di mangiar bene.