“ERFZONDE” now out in Dutch translation! I’m particularly excited about this edition because of the outsized role that Dutch scientists have played & still play in the genomics revolution. To all my Netherlands BG colleagues, this is a love letter to your work
www.debezigebij.nl/boek/erfzonde/
Portrait taken by the amazing Liz Moskowitz (www.lizmoskowitz.com) at the James Turrell Skyspace here at UT: turrell.utexas.edu
'Behavioural genetics makes people uncomfortable because it gets at the fundamental tension of being human, “which is that we are both caused creatures and experience ourselves to be subjective agents” '.
New interview in @theobserveruk.bsky.social
observer.co.uk/culture/inte...
the smoking result is more interpretable if you remember that most of the genetic variance in smoking is not specific to smoking but shared with other disinhibited, risk-taking behaviors, & that EXT-associated genetic variants are broadly associated with mortality (incl. infection, injury)
I talked with @nautil.us about LSD, MAHA, eugenics, essentialism, Christ on the cross, and all the things I don't know: nautil.us/the-bad-seed...
I woke up to a fantastic review of ORIGINAL SIN in @thetimes.com:
"This is a serious and knotty book ... but it can be beautiful. ... Ultimately, this is a well-informed attack on an American style of justice that relies on notions of sin and punishment. ... a darkly glittering book."
My dear friend Paige Harden and I both have new books out, and both are about crime & punishment — but from different (though still evidence-based) perspectives.
Episode 147 "The Genetics of Vice" is out ✨
In this episode, we talk with Kathryn Paige Harden @kph3k.bsky.social, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she leads the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and teaches Introduction to Psychology.
“In this complex, thought-provoking book Harden explores the stories of some of the worst people you have heard of …and asks her readers to contemplate an uncomfortable question: these people are not so very different from you and I. So how should a just society treat them?”
“These memoiristic sections also explore the challenge, and necessity, of building bridges between scientific theory … and our own, subjective experiences of what it means to be a moral agent.” YES! The form of the book is content.
ORiGINAL SIN reviewed in @theguardian.com: “Harden is exceptionally skilled at interweaving the personal and the scientific. She writes about her own life experiences … with rare, dangerous honesty”
www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...
Michel! I am so happy that this was your reading experience. Part of why the book took me soooo long to write is that it was difficult to get out of defensive mode. I had to think about being interesting to a smart, good faith reader rather than convincing to a critical one, which feels vulnerable
"...Much of Harden’s prose is dazzling on the sentence level, in the vein of neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s posthumously published 'When Breath Becomes Air.'"
A wonderful review of ORIGINAL SIN in @undark.org: undark.org/2026/03/27/b...
YES
My favorite book photo yet!
A German shepherd dog, a very good girl, holding a copy of Original Sin while resting on the side.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Original Sin by @kph3k.bsky.social , an evidence-based yet personal account from a scientist’s perspective.
Daisy liked it too because of the bit about her family dog 🐕
Review by @jaimealyse.bsky.social. It ran yesterday in Sunday's print edition; I will post a link later if published online.
The @nytimes.com Book Review praises ORIGINAL SIN as "a daring, complex, sometimes confounding and ultimately powerful tapestry of a book." I'm absolutely thrilled by this review, which captures "the dialectical work" at the heart of my project.
ORIGINAL SIN reviewed in Science (@science.org)!
"... an ambitious, compact, and often moving contribution
to the literature at the intersection of genetics and ethics."
Tonight (3/19)! Free and in-person at Harvard Book Store. Come talk about the science of sin & punishment with me and Rebecca Saxe (MIT). (It’s such a novel topic my phone tried to auto-correct “sin” to “sun” at least 5 times while writing this message.)
I had the opportunity to talk about my new book, Original Sin, with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman for their Armchair Expert podcast. They were dream conversation partners who engaged with the science, the philosophy, and the lived experience of addiction. Full conversation here: youtu.be/FUgexgsSBuU
Book cover of Kathryn Paige Harden’s “Original Sin: On the Generics of vice, the problem of blame, and the future of forgiveness”
Just finished @kph3k.bsky.social’s “Original Sin” about genetic (and environmental) influences on behaviors that we morally condemn, and their implications for how we think about blame and justice. Greatly enjoyed reading this one!>
next week! I will be in conversation with Rebecca Saxe from MIT about ideas from my new book, ORIGINAL SIN. In-person and free at Harvard Book Store.
It's publication day for ORIGINAL SIN! On Substack, I wrote about my pub day jitters, and what my 3-year-old has to teach me about making art:
kathrynpaigeharden.substack.com/p/i-have-alr...
Prepping for our next interview on @bigbiology.bsky.social…great read on a great Florida day, @kph3k.bsky.social !
ORIGINAL SIN comes out on Tuesday!
If you’re in the US & want a signed copy, order from Black Pearl Books in the next week. Just be sure to note that you want it signed (& any instructions about the inscription) in the order notes at checkout.
shop.blackpearlbookstore.com/item/ymASTSS...
GENETICS: @kph3k.bsky.social from @universityoftexas.bsky.social highlighted a major gap in psychiatric genetics: conduct disorder is common, serious, and moderately heritable, yet has been dramatically understudied.
#AGBTGM26
I had fun talking with the "Love Factually" boys about Fatal Attraction, the 1987 movie in which every main character commits some act of violence. Whose violence is the audience rooting for? Whose violence did they want to see punished? And what can that teach us? podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f...
