Prof. Alexandra Horowitz considers the fall of the footnote

In The New York Times, Barnard psychology professor Alexandra Horowitz champions the footnote in an essay about their disappearance from electronic books.  She writes:

"Since typing that small type, I have received dozens of angry and concerned queries about the anecdote. Why had I fed her grapes? Did I not know they were toxic? After some back-and-forth, I was surprised to discover that these incredulous comments often came from readers of the electronic version of my book, where the footnotes are shunted off to the end of the text, relegated to being mere endnotes. If footnotes are at risk of going unread, endnotes are even more so."

Read the full essay here.

Also in The New York Times, Prof. Horowitz considers research on happiness from bee and sheep scientists and linguists and artificial intelligence experts. An excerpt:

"Shakespear may have written “O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes,” but he apparently never met many psychologists, a good number of whom have been attempting to do exactly this for some time. Psychology and its social-science cousin, behavioral economics, seem to have a lock on “happiness studies,” tackling vexing questions about our positive and negative moods and our feelings of satisfaction and well-being."

Read the full essay here.

Prof. Horowitz's research is in animal cognition. She is currently testing anthropomorphisms made of the domestic dog, through experiments with dogs in natural settings. She is the author of the book Inside of a dog: What dogs see, smell, and know.