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I interview people who lived in the past. I'm an anthropologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, but I call myself a biohistorian. I'm trying to understand human history, not from human artefacts, temples or big walls surrounding old cities, but from bones. They record every important aspect of your life: what you eat, your ailments, your broken hand at age five.

"I'm going to teach a new course this fall, tentatively titled "Technology and Social Change". It's going to include an examination of the four levers of social change Larry Lessig suggests in Code and which I've been exploring as possible paths to civic engagement. It will include deep methodological dives into codesign, and into using anthropology as tool for understanding user needs. It will look at unintended consequences, cases where technology's best intentions fail, and cases where careful exploration and preparation led to technosocial systems that make users and communities more powerful than they were before."

"Everyone knows these statements aren't literally true, but although we might understand their figurative meaning, they continue to reflect, and influence, how we think. Even biologists, being quite human, too often think metaphorically and assign properties to genes that genes don't have. The metaphor works because our society has a deeply embedded belief in genes as clearly identifiable material things which explain our individual natures, making them inherent from the moment of our conception and thus predictable. If hydrogen and oxygen are the causal atoms of water, genes are the causal atoms of our existence."

"Since we first started carving notches in sticks, we have used things in the world to help us to know that world. But never before have we relied on things that did not mirror human patterns of reasoning - we knew what each notch represented - and that we could not later check to see how our non-sentient partners in knowing came up with those answers. If knowing has always entailed being able to explain and justify our true beliefs - Plato's notion, which has persisted for over two thousand years - what are we to make of a new type of knowledge, in which that task of justification is not just difficult or daunting but impossible?"

""'Conquering' nature has long been the western way," writes Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. "Our hubris, and often our religious ideologies, have led us to believe we are above nature and have a right to subdue and control it. We let our technical abilities get ahead of our wisdom. We're learning now that working with nature-understanding that we are part of it-is more cost-effective and efficient in the long run." In our new normal, one way to work with nature might be to let her have her coastlines back."