marekkohn




PicoSearch
Trust

A Reason for Everything paperback

A Reason For Everything

as we know it

dope girls


about

me and what I do

 

books 

Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good

Oxford University Press, 2008

'Brilliant' - Guardian


Chapter 1: Just Going Round to the Shop

Trust: The Page 99 Test

Interview with Radical Anthropology



A Reason For Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination


Faber & Faber, 2004 (paperback 2005).


'Brilliant' - Sunday Telegraph
'Beautifully written' - Times
'Brilliant ...
beautifully written' - Daily Telegraph



'a supremely intelligent author’ - Graham Farmelo, London Sunday Telegraph

'A marvellous book'  - James Flint,  New Scientist

'a wonderful writer' - A.C. Grayling, Literary Review

'One of the best science writers we have' - Andrew Brown, London Guardian

'yet another brilliant book' - Neal Ascherson, London Observer

'a talented and witty writer' - Paul Harvey FRS, Times Higher Education Supplement

'a very good book' - Richard Fortey FRS



As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind

Granta, 1999.

"Utterly fascinating ... a beautiful and moving picture of evolution." - Andrew Marr, Observer



Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground

Latest edition Granta, 2003.

"The best, most perceptive and most authoritative account of the British drug scene ever." - Will Self

Interview about Dope Girls, Waterstone's Online.

 The Chemical Generation and its Ancestors: Dance Crazes and Drug Panics across Eight Decades (International Journal of Drugs Policy 8/3, 1997)


The Race Gallery

This is a site I created to accompany my book The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science, which appeared in 1995.


 

email


 

links

Darwin@LSE

NATO - Suzanne Treister

articles


Materiel World (essay for Suzanne Treister's NATO project)

Trust


MPs must be told what we expect before trust can blossom again (Times 22 June 2009)

Who can you trust? (New Statesman 26 June 2008)


Evolutionary thinking


Did Charles Darwin believe in racial inequality? (London Independent 30 January 2009)

Review of Michael Boulter's Darwin's Garden (London Independent 25 July 2008)

Review of Richard Fortey's Dry Store Room No. 1 (London Independent 15 February 2008)

Review of James D. Watson's Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science and J. Craig Venter's  A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life (London Independent 2 November 2007)

Review of Stephen Murdoch's IQ: The Brilliant Idea That Failed (London Independent 20 July 2007)

Review of Steve Jones's Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise and Mark Lynas's  Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (London Independent 13 April 2007)

Review of Michael Ruse's Darwinism and its Discontents and George Levine's Darwin Loves You (London Independent 13 January 2007)

Ideas: Neanderthals  (New Statesman 30 October 2006)

Review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (London Independent 20 September 2006)

Ideas: Sex on the Brain : on sex differences (New Statesman 7 August 2006)

Savannahstan: Beyond Africa and Asia (author's version of 'Made in Savannahstan', New Scientist 1 July 2006)

Review of Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief (London Independent 21 April 2006)

Review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (London Independent 10 March 2006)

Review of Robert Sapolsky's Monkeyluv, and Other Lessons on Our Lives as Animals (London Independent 11 January 2006)

Review of Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals (London Independent 29 July 2005)

Ebu Gogo, Dwarf or Hobbit? (author's version of 'The Little Troublemaker', New Scientist 18 June 2005)

Review of Ian McEwan's Saturday (London Independent 4 February 2005)

Darwin Day and the Peppered Moths (Independent on Sunday London section 29 February 2004)

John Maynard Smith (New Statesman 14 July 2003)

Review of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London Independent 14 September 2002)

Unity is Health: An Evolutionary Left (author's version of 'An Evolutionary Left', Prospect October 2001)

Market Eugenics (Prospect May 2000)

Handaxes: Products of Sexual Selection? Marek Kohn & Steven Mithen (Antiquity 73, 1999)

Views for the Left - Peter Singer (London Independent on Sunday 24 May 1998)

Cinderella Revisited - Martin Daly and Margo Wilson (London Independent on Sunday 24 November 1996)

Drive an Escort, not a Ferrari, and be happy - Robert Frank (London Independent on Sunday 16 June 1996)



Polish questions

Work, save, go . . . or stay?: Poles in Britain (New Statesman 11 October 2007)

How Britain can help Poles (newstatesman.com, 5 June 2008

A Very Modern Migration: Poles in Britain (Catalyst March 2007)

Review of James Hopkin's Winter Under Water (London Independent 24 February 2007)

Ideas: Enemies of the People: on populism (New Statesman 28 August 2006)

Poland's Beacon for Europe (openDemocracy 25 October 2005)

Review of Pawel Huelle's Mercedes-Benz (New Statesman 3 October 2005)


Race

It Depends What You Mean by Difference (from 30:At the Turning of the Tide, Commission for Racial Equality, November 2006)

Ideas: Colour Shift: on race and science (New Statesman 12 June 2006)

Review of Joel N. Shurkin's Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (New Statesman 3 July 2006)

This Racist Undercurrent in the Tide of Genetic Research (London Guardian 17 January 2006)

Genes and the Nation State (Independent on Sunday London section 16 March 2003)

So What Tribe Do You Belong To? (New Statesman 30 July 2001)



Health and inequality

Unknown Knowns: The Relationship between Inequality and Health (conference paper, September 2006)

Ideas: From Top to Bottom : on equality (New Statesman 10 July 2006)

Review of Richard Wilkinson's The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier (Prospect September 2005)

Why an Unequal  Society is an Unhealthy Society  (New Statesman 26 July 2004)

Review of Michael Marmot's Status Syndrome (London Independent, 18 June 2004)


Local interest

Down Town (The Brighton Moment)




All my articles on the New Statesman site
















John Maynard Smith 1920-2004

 

`Twitter: @marekkohn



dialogues

Politics UK, BBC World Service 27 June 2009, on trust and politics - not exactly a dialogue but I'm one of the interviewees.

Thinking Allowed, 'Cocaine Girls in the West End', presented by Laurie Taylor, BBC Radio 4.


Thinking Allowed, on Trust, with Onora O'Neill; presented by Laurie Taylor, BBC Radio 4.


Author on ice, 81 degrees N


In July 2007 I had the privilege of accompanying a group of British school students on the Ice Edge expedition, sailing around Svalbard to the edge of the Arctic ice. I wrote an article based on the trip for the New Statesman.
photo: Mark Pepper



Interview with ReadySteadyBook


The Royal Institution asked scientists, writers and the Archbishop of Canterbury about their favourite science books. My response:

Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon. ‘”The mists rise up out of the Bog. There she is, full, spherickal ... the last time I shall see her as a Material Being ... when next appearing, she will have resum'd her Deity.” Maskelyne will edit this out, which is why Mason leaves it in his Field Report.’ Thus Pynchon imagines the eighteenth-century astronomer Charles Mason observing a Transit of Venus: subtle phrasing, prose that sustains lasting pleasure, mischief, irony and wit; powerfully imparting a sense of science in a world still haunted and occult, and reminding the reader of all that is absent from conventional science writing.