This blog should actually be called something like “Post-academic culture-oriented psychology,” with the accent on the “post” in “post-academic.” My Russian friends who lived under the Soviet regime had a delightful word for what they did to deal with the political powers-that-were – ob’khodeet’ – which means literally to “go around,” to go around the strictures and structures that made everyday life a struggle just to breathe, much less prosper. My love-hate relationship with academia was very bound up in this sense of intellectual claustrophobia. What promised to be a grand inquiry into the meaning of being human in the end degenerated into a set of formulas for getting published in a high-impact psychology journal, with all the panorama of the human soul desiccated into a few pages of abstruse statistical analysis.

From a youthful fascination with cultural anthropology and Chinese studies I moved on, first to computers, then to health psychology and behavioral medicine, and thus into cross-cultural psychology. That also led to my first real experience with academia, and I fled (with a mere MA) into a Masters in Public Health Program, which, alas, I didn’t finish. Later I returned for an MS in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, with even more involvement in cultural issues. All along, though, every time I had to write an APA-style article, something in me rebelled – the “Is this all there is?” syndrome, you could call it. So this is my answer. No, that isn’t all there is. I want to be a science writer, and I want to write about culture and psychology and human life in general without the necessity of an APA citation list and five-part article structure (meeting a journal’s page limit, of course). The process of writing itself is part of that, and along with the psychology/anthropology/sociology/etc. will be book reviews and author portraits of what I feel is particularly interesting.

Surely there are other people who feel the same way I do, and I hope with this blog to meet some of them online. I hope that readers will find this blog interesting in itself, but also that it can be part of an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human in the world.