Barbara J King

Looking for an unusual 5K obstacle race this summer? Feeling a need to reconnect with a 40,000-year-ago paleo lifestyle? Craving some meat?

For anyone who can get to Lake Odessa, Michigan, on August 10, Track Meat may be the event for you.

At Track Meat, competitors will sign up ...

As NPR reported over the weekend, the first monument to atheism erected on government property in the United States has been dedicated in Florida.

As an atheist myself, I'm all for public awareness and acceptance of atheism. But American Atheists, the group responsible for the monument, has, I ...

Imagine this: Another child has spit milk through a straw directly into your severely milk-allergic child's face. Your child goes into anaphylaxis, having been bullied specifically because of his or her food allergy.

Research shows that about 1/3 of kids with food allergies are bullied by other kids because ...

I'm on vacation this week, resting and walking along the New Jersey shore. Naturally, I have sea creatures on my mind. Dolphins, especially.

In a post last week about dolphins, Robert Krulwich cited these cetaceans' big brains as the primary source of our fascination with them. Without question, these ...

In the wake of the 439 comments on my last post about obesity and weight-bias in our society, I've been thinking about issues of comparative health around the world and, as I have before, about the Paleo diet.

A vigorous thread on last week's post (see the top ...

On Sunday, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, a professor currently on leave from the University of New Mexico with a visiting position at New York University, tweeted a comment that sent shock waves through academia and beyond:

Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to ...

Two weeks ago, I wrote here about my new cancer diagnosis and my upcoming robot-assisted surgery.

The surgery occurred as planned on May 24; after a single rough night in the hospital, I went home and my recovery has proceeded completely on track (with the usual ups and downs ...

Sexual thrill-seeker. Sex-mad flatmate.

These phrases, as reported by ABC News's Diane Sawyer, have been used by the media to describe Amanda Knox, the American study abroad student who, while living in Perugia, Italy, in 2007, was charged with murder. Specifically, she was charged with killing her female roommate, ...

It's not a national craze; it may never become one. But for an anthropologist, this micro-trend is fascinating to note: some parents, mostly in one area of New York City, as far as I can tell, are raising their children from birth without diapers.

As I first learned from

My husband and I recently attended a production of the Mozart Requiem at James Madison University's gorgeous Forbes Center for the Performing Arts. The stage was full. Conducted by Dr. Jo-Anne van der Vat-Chromy, sung by the JMU Chorale (in which our daughter is a soprano), with music ...

On Earth Day 2013, I'd like to draw your notice to a fantastic essay by Andrea Wulf in The New York Times Book Review. Wulf explains how information recorded by Henry David Thoreau in his journals is now informing modern climate-change research.

In journal passages, some of which formed ...

Research published last week in the journal Nature shows that hunter-gatherer people living in Japan 15,000 ago cooked food in ceramic pots. Chemical analysis of the charred remains in the pots demonstrates that the food items were both marine and freshwater in origin, and almost certainly fish rather than ...

Eleanor was the matriarch of an elephant family called the First Ladies. One day, elephant researchers in Kenya's Samburu National Reserve saw that Eleanor was bruised and dragging her trunk on the ground. Soon, she collapsed.

Within minutes, Grace, the matriarch of another elephant family, came near. Using her trunk, ...

Addicted, that's what we are: My husband and I are addicted to BBC television shows. We watch BBC series via Netflix streaming, the "instant" option available to Netflix customers.

This past weekend, we chose a show called The Last Enemy starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Like thousands of others, we are ...

You're "an animal person." You care about animals, and not only the furry, cute ones. You strive to make personal choices that don't contribute to animals' suffering.

Maybe you stopped eating meat from factory farms first. Before long, as you experimented successfully with vegetarian foods, you decided to stop eating ...

In a book coming out next week called The Bonobo and the Atheist, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that morality is built into our species. Rather than coming to us top-down from God, or any other external source, morality for de Waal springs bottom-up from our emotions and ...

Last month, a traveler from California named Riya Suising came to Virginia (where I live) on business. While here, Suising decided to visit a spa and relax in its communal, sex-segregated baths, something she, a marathon runner, often does at home.

What happened next shocked her. The spa's manager ...

"There is no such thing as humane meat." This conclusion was drawn by Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA, in an opinion piece published last week in The Huffington Post.

Newkirk's point of view is not new (Farm Sanctuary's Bruce Friedrich has called humane meat "a contradiction ...

The Fierce People. That's what anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon called the indigenous Ya̧nomamö Indians of Venezuela in his 1968 book Ya̧nomamö: The Fierce People. It's one of the best-selling anthropology texts of all time and is still in wide use.

In the 45 years since the book's release, Chagnon has ...

Historians and museum curators have chosen 50 objects that tell the long history of New York City; to an anthropologist's eye, they've done a superb job of emphasizing the importance of material culture in human life.