Baby Classes: Mommy and Me Yoga, Loneliness, and the Growth of the Infant Brain by Sam Apple

The Best of San Diego City Works Press

Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City WorksPress. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.

“Baby Classes: Mommy and Me Yoga, Loneliness, and the Growth of the Infant Brain,” an excerpt from Sam Apple’s book American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland, appeared in City Works Press’ anthology Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting edited by Alys Masek and Kelly Mayhew.

It’s a good time to be a studious baby. American babies today can take a class in just about anything: music and rhythm, dancing, Chinese, yoga, gymnastics, sign language, even cooking.

The classes aren’t cheap. In New York, a yearlong music program can cost up to six thousand dollars. But the expense doesn’t seem to be slowing demand. Music Together, a franchise of music classes for young children, has expanded to 1,700 communities around the country, and the number of teacher-training sessions has doubled since 2000. Some New York baby classes are so highly sought after that parents add their baby to the waiting lists on the day of their birth. The hottest class of the moment, Little Maestros, a music class for children as young as six months, is so popular that some parents are reportedly trying to bribe instructors for a spot. The brochures for baby classes are usually filled with the same claims about stimulating or developing infant minds that are now found on almost every baby product—in addition to exposing children to music, Little Maestros includes “language development activities.” Music Together emphasizes that the classes offer a “research-based, developmentally appropriate early childhood music curriculum.” And while many parents no doubt ignore these claims, for some parents the educational benefits of the classes are the main draw. “I want my child to have any edge another child has,” one father told The New York Times in 2006, explaining why he spends six thousand dollars a year on classes for his three-year-old. In New York, in particular, where preschool enrollment is often a highly competitive process complete with intelligence tests, getting a baby into the right class can feel like a high-stakes proposition. “Fail to provide the right stimulation during early childhood and your child will suffer devastating consequences,” Sara Mead wrote in a 2007 Education Sector report on the false claims about infant education. “Pass on baby water aerobics, in other words, and you can say goodbye to college.”

The classes and products might be entertaining for babies, but as the Education Sector report makes clear, that doesn’t mean that babies gain any developmental benefits from them. In fact, much of the science behind the claims for baby classes and products relies upon the same creative interpretations of brain research that inspired Brent Logan to invent the BabyPlus Prenatal Education System. The enthusiasm for stimulating baby brains can be traced back to the last decades of the twentieth century. Logan was seemingly interested in the growth of neurons—the cells of the brain and nervous system—but the parents, educators, and policy makers hoping to stimulate babies have been more focused on synapses, the chemical junctions that connect one neuron to another.

Neurologists have long known that cognitive development depends upon neurons making connections with one another—but it was only in the 1970s, when a handful of researchers undertook the painstaking task of dissecting animal and human brains and counting the synapses under microscopes, that we began to discover when the networks are formed. And perhaps more so than any other scientists in recent decades, those synapse-counting neurologists changed the way we raise our children today. Before synapse counting began, brain researchers assumed that the adult brain was much more dense in synapses than the infant brain, since adults are capable of much more complicated cognitive tasks. But the opposite now appears to be true. Right around the time of birth, synapses begin to grow at an astonishing rate, trillions of them, and the spectacular growth continues in spurts throughout the first two years of life until the brain has many more synapses than can ever be used. As the brain continues to mature, the active synapses are strengthened and the unused synapses begin to die off—a process known as synaptic pruning, which continues throughout adolescence.

It’s easy to see why the findings about the growth and decline of synapses captured the public’s imagination as the studies were written up under provocative newspaper and magazine headlines. If synapses in the brain grow rapidly only in the first years of life, and if the synapses that aren’t actively used die off, then it takes only a small leap to arrive at the idea that the more our brains are stimulated in the first years of life, the more synapses we will have, and the more powerful our brains will be. And these links—between stimulation and more synapses and between more synapses and more brain power—looked even stronger after a handful of rat studies found that raising young rats in enriched environments could not only make the rats better at solving tasks but could also increase the number of synapses in adult rat brains.

The excitement about synapses also fit together well with another line of research that was generating excitement during the same period. Neurologists at the time knew that if adults developed cataracts and lost the ability to see, their vision would return if the cataracts were removed. But if a child was born with cataracts that were not removed by age five or later, the blinded eye or eyes would remain blind for life.

Because of the ethical problems, it was hard for neurologists to study sensory deprivation in humans. But in the 1960s, attempting to better understand the phenomenon, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel found that if they placed a patch over a kitten’s eye for the first three months of its life, the cat would remain permanently blind in that eye. And when Hubel and Wiesel dissected the cats’ brains, they saw that without incoming data from the eyes, the visual cortex failed to develop properly. Eyesight in both cats and humans appeared to be dependent upon a critical period very early in life, and if the critical period passed without proper environmental stimulation, the damage was permanent.

Hubel and Wiesel’s famous research—they later won a Nobel Prize—had focused on the visual cortex of cat brains, but the implications were tantalizing for anyone interested in how the human brain develops. Perhaps, the reasoning went, it wasn’t just vision that was subject to critical periods. Perhaps if children didn’t receive the right stimulation in the first years of life, their brains would forever be as useless as the eyes of those blindfolded kittens.

The move from stimulated rats and blind kittens to the intelligence of babies is one that few scientists have ever been willing to make. But the absence of conclusive research did nothing to stop the flow of popular articles about the new brain studies that began to emerge in the 1980s. In one typical example, a 1986 article in Parents magazine titled “Brain Power: You Can Make Babies Smarter,” the educational psychologist Jane M. Healy cited the same studies on the stimulation of infant rats that Logan had mentioned to me and argued that the new neuroscientific research implied that if infants were not stimulated from an early age it could affect their lifelong ability to learn.

By the 1990s, the hype about making connections between children’s neurons before it was too late had reached a fever pitch. In a 1996 Newsweek cover story, “Your Child’s Brain,” Sharon Begley wrote that a baby’s experiences can wire neural circuits just as a programmer uses a keyboard to reconfigure the circuits of a computer. “Which keys are typed—which experiences a child has—determines whether the child grows up to be intelligent or dull, fearful or self-assured, articulate or tongue-tied,” Begley declared. ABC, for its part, aired a celebrity-filled prime-time special on the importance of early stimulation. And Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, organized the Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning in 1997 so that leading scientists and pediatricians could come together to discuss the implications of the latest research on neurons and synapses.

Meanwhile the discussion of brain development in the media was moving beyond claims about intelligence to more dramatic claims about the social implications of failing to stimulate babies. “Unfortunately, for a growing number of children, the period from birth to age three has become a mental wasteland,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ronald Kotulak writes in his 1997 book Inside the Brain. “Society needs to focus on this period if it is to do something about the increasing rates of violent and criminal acts.”

In the face of so much hype, it was easy to forget that none of the studies being touted in the press had shown that babies benefited from early stimulation of their senses. Neurologists and developmental psychologists now believe that, while the early findings about blindfolded cats oversimplified a very complicated process, some fundamental, species-wide human abilities, such as the ability to see and hear and use language properly, are subject to critical periods. But the research had found only that complete sensory deprivation could impede development. There has never been good evidence that extra stimulation—beyond the sights and sounds that all babies hear in the course of daily life—enhances infant development.

The good news for all of us is that, for most of the ways that we learn, critical periods don’t appear to exist. The thrust of the most recent brain research points in the opposite direction. Rather than remaining frozen in time after age three, the human brain is amazingly plastic and continues to change—and even grow new neurons—into adulthood. With the notable exception of the ability to perfect foreign accents, the type of learning we do in school or throughout our daily lives has little to do with critical periods, which is why adults can still master complicated cognitive tasks such as reading. As John T. Bruer notes in his book The Myth of the First Three Years, “Binocular vision might only develop during a certain period, but we can learn algebra at any point in our lives.”

Moreover, as Bruer also makes clear, even if we somehow could stimulate babies and prevent synapses from dying off, we have no idea how additional synapses would affect intelligence, if at all. Some neurologists think that synaptic pruning is the key to intellectual development. Even the rat-stimulation studies turned out to be misleading. Further research found that the synaptic growth in stimulated rats only took place in the visual areas of the rats’ brains and, since the same changes would occur when older rats were stimulated, the rat studies said nothing about critical periods.

Perhaps because they don’t make for good journalism, the later findings that dimmed the hopes of would-be baby stimulators received almost no attention in the media. Meanwhile, in the early nineties, enthusiasm for critical periods and synapses still on the rise, a single study of thirty-six college students further muddled the public’s understanding of infant brain development. The study, published in Nature, found that college students did better on tests of spatial imagery if they listened to a Mozart sonata. The effect wore off after a few minutes, and a number of efforts to repeat the results failed, but by then it was too late. The Mozart Effect had been released into the zeitgeist. In a 1999 review of the most cited studies in the top fifty U.S. newspapers, Stanford researchers found that the Mozart study was cited 8.3 times more than the second most popular paper at that time.

The Mozart Effect generated so much excitement that states across the country drew up legislation to expose children to classical music. Georgia governor Zell Miller asked his state legislature to put aside $100,000 so that every newborn in the state could receive a classical CD or cassette. The state of Florida passed a law that required state-run schools to play classical music to toddlers every day.

And among the people to take note of all of the latest studies

about baby brains was a mom in Colorado named Julie Aigner-

Clark, who tapped into the baby stimulation craze more successfully

than anyone else when she videotaped a handful of toys, set

the footage to classical music, and then, in a final brilliant stroke,

called her creation Baby Einstein.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is now a small but zealous backlash against the obsession with infant stimulation. And for any parents hoping to build better baby brains, infant classes and products are probably an enormous waste of money. Even more disturbing, educators and policy makers who believe that the first years of life are the key to intellectual development risk deemphasizing education programs that focus on the following years of childhood, which, the current evidence suggests, have a bigger impact on a child’s academic success.

Still, while there is no solid evidence that music classes or Baby Einstein videos help babies develop, there is also no solid evidence that too many products or classes harm babies. And whether or not baby classes have any developmental or educational value, there are plenty of good reasons to sign up for them. I suspect that, like Jennifer and me, a lot of the parents take the classes for a much more practical reason: They have no idea what to do with their time.

As I adjusted to parenthood, my new understanding of time felt almost as profound as when I first pondered the theory of relativity—perhaps even more so, since I actually understood what I was thinking about. Before parenthood, time was elusive. I could get out of bed, have brunch with a friend, and somewhere along the way the day would slip away. But when I was taking care of Isaac during that first year, time was never slippery, no matter how much fun I might be having or how much love I might be feeling. Time was slow and sticky. It clung to the skin like wet paper. When I was a nonparent, I would often start a Sunday at noon. But when I woke up with Isaac at 5:30 in the morning, noon was a million miles away. Noon was like a desert mirage that I could only dream of reaching. Sometimes, to pass the hours and to keep myself awake, I would sing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” all the way down. Other times, I would lie on the floor and let Isaac claw at my eyes for sport. (It occurred to me during one of these sessions that this is the real Oedipus complex—they want to claw our eyes out!)

The difference in my perspective on time only hit me fully one Sunday while Jennifer and I were shopping at Target. It was around four o’clock. We had already been at the store for several hours and had visited every section at least once.

“I guess we should head home,” Jennifer said.

I had spent my entire life trying to avoid shopping trips and yet at that moment, I realized something incredible: I did not want to leave Target. During the winter, when it was too cold to go to the park, leaving Target meant going home, and the one fundamental law of parenting during the first year is that time moves more slowly inside the home than outside.

“Let’s just hang around here a little more,” I said.

“You want to hang around at Target?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“But we already have everything we need.”

I thought for a moment. “Let’s look at the DVDs again,” I said.

We continued to walk around the store, and as the other shoppers hurried past us, my childhood began to make more sense. I had remembered spending a lot of time at Target while growing up in Houston. But until that afternoon it had never occurred to me that my father couldn’t possibly have needed to make that many trips to the store, no matter how wide the selection or reasonable the prices. We had been at Target because Target was a place to be on the weekends. In Houston you went to Target for the air conditioning. In New York you went for the warmth. But the principle was the same.

Jennifer agreed that it was important to get out of the apartment with Isaac, but she wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of spending our weekends looking at the same DVDs over and over. Probably we should have just organized a new parents’ group or arranged more get-togethers with the new friends Jennifer had made in her moms’ group. Instead we decided to spend several hundred dollars on a Music Together class.

The Music Together class was Jennifer’s idea, but I was all for it. I liked the idea of sitting and singing as babies crawled around a tambourine-covered carpet and slapped at drums. The problem with Music Together, I soon discovered, is the seriousness with which the company takes this educational mission. Each week the instructors would urge us to practice at home with the CD that we’d been given at the first class—one of the instructors even referred to the CD as homework.

In fairness, it’s possible that older children who take the classes get something out of them. Many children who begin playing instruments at a young age do excel. Because musical development is so complicated from a neurological perspective and involves so many different areas of the brain, it’s particularly difficult to determine whether a critical period exists. A 2005 review of the literature on critical periods and musical development in the Journal of Developmental Psychobiology concluded that “the effects of early enrichment or early deprivation on the emergence of sensitivity to . . . various aspects of music pitch structure remain largely unknown.”

In any case, our Music Together teachers were much more focused on the participation of the parents than the babies. Part of the company’s educational philosophy is that babies learn from watching their parents. As one of the founders of Music Together once put it in an interview, “It’s an educational tragedy, really, an educational disaster, musically speaking, for one’s children, if you just sit on the couch and consume music. They need the model of your musical doing in order to get the disposition to be a music maker.”

I had no problem with Music Together’s parent-centered educational philosophy, and I was more than happy to sing along. But the instructors’ almost militant insistence that parents stay involved even when their children are nowhere to be found led to the same unfortunate scene repeating itself week after week: Isaac would crawl away, or Jennifer would take him into an adjacent room to feed him, and the next thing I knew I would be running in circles and waving chiffon rainbow scarves over my head with a group of strangers.

Music Together was only the beginning of our time-filling activities. We also attended a “Sign and Sing” baby sign language class during which Isaac and the other babies sat and watched as the parents sang about baby kangaroos and learned to sign “I want milk.” And one Sunday afternoon, we attended a Baby Loves Disco party at a local rock-and-roll club.

Baby Loves Disco, a series of dance parties for babies and parents that have sprung up around the country, sounded like a great idea to me when I first heard about it. The parties have become part of a larger hipster parenting trend that has swept through New York and across the country in recent years. Critics of the trend have complained that young parents are trying to push back adulthood by dressing their babies in heavy-metal onesies, but, though I’ve tried, I can’t see the downside to ironic onesies. If anything, the right to dress your child in ridiculous outfits struck me as fair payback for all parents do during the first year—or, at least this is what I was thinking when we dressed Isaac as a French painter for his first Halloween and taped a paintbrush and a piece of baguette to him.

Baby Loves Disco lived up to my expectations for a few minutes. I was amused by the scene when I stepped into the dark dance hall. As a DJ spun records onstage, toddlers with juice boxes mingled with beer-guzzling adults.

But the charm of the scene wore off once Jennifer and Isaac and I made it onto the strobe-lit dance floor. At that point Baby Loves Disco became a haunting reminder of my junior-high dances. Jennifer was bopping around and holding Isaac so that he was facing her, and I was left with the unfortunate choice that every awkward twelve-year-old boy knows too well: Either dance by yourself in the vicinity of a female and pretend as though you don’t mind dancing alone or hurry to the food table and pretend as though you don’t mind drinking twenty consecutive cups of Pepsi. The female sex has ingeniously solved this dilemma by joining together and dancing in groups, but the guys are on their own; like wild apes who have been evicted from the troupe by the high-status males, we can do nothing but lurk and hope—although, unlike wild apes, we can also fantasize about taking over the dance floor with John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever routine.

After a minute or so of lumbering awkwardly around my wife and child as “Billie Jean” blasted from the speakers, my inner twelve-year-old returned and I headed to the bar, where I spent the next twenty minutes sucking down juice boxes and feeling sorry for myself. And as I watched the others dance, I realized that the real problem with Baby Loves Disco was the babies. The painful truth is that babies are not that into dark clubs. What parents really need, I thought, is a nightclub with a special soundproofed room in the back full of Pack ’n Plays and nannies. For a moment I imagined how incredible this parenting club would be and how much fun Jennifer and I could have there. Then I remembered that we didn’t particularly like clubs and never went to them before Isaac was born.

If I wasn’t always at ease during our weekend baby activities, I at least had Jennifer with me. Even though Isaac was becoming better company every month, it was even harder to fill the hours on the two days a week that I took care of him by myself. Because it was closer to our apartment than Target, we spent a lot of time in the supermarket. While the rest of the shoppers rushed by, Isaac and I would fondle the fruits and tip over cereal boxes as though it were a carnival game. Isaac particularly liked looking at the Quaker Oats guy, and, inevitably, from time to time someone I vaguely knew would stroll by and be surprised to find me sitting on the floor of the supermarket with a baby and an armful of oatmeal canisters.

When I would begin to fear that the supermarket management might be taking notice of our prolonged presence, Isaac and I would move on to a café or to Barnes & Noble, where we spent so much time during the winter that I almost felt obliged to begin paying rent.

One particularly lonely day, I had the idea that I would integrate myself into one of the cliques of Caribbean nannies on the playground benches. I had the entire white-liberal fantasy mapped out in my head. I would ask them for advice on some sort of baby issue, and within a few weeks, I would not only be a regular part of the group at the playground but also be good friends with the nannies. Soon the Caribbean nannies and I would be breaking down social barriers right and left with heartfelt cultural exchanges. They would come back to our apartment and teach me how to cook flavorful rice dishes and I would give them thick chunks of store-bought challah and talk to them about forming a union or gaining legal immigration status—that I know nothing about either subject had no bearing on this particular fantasy.

It was a nice, if vaguely offensive, fantasy, but then, I was pretty sure that the nannies didn’t like me. Once I got Isaac’s foot stuck in a bench at the playground. And as I spent two minutes trying to wrestle it free, I could see the nannies looking at me and shaking their heads. I knew they were thinking, “amateur,” but I felt I could do no right in their eyes. Sometimes I would take Isaac out in his fluffy bear suit on a lukewarm day, and as soon as Isaac cried, the nannies would shake their heads and tell me he was hot. Another time, I was wheeling Isaac around in only a T-shirt and diaper, and a nanny stopped and looked at Isaac without even acknowledging me. “Daddy took you out naked?” she said, the disdain visible on her face.

One night, after a particularly lonely day in the supermarket, I complained to Jennifer that Isaac and I needed a new activity. Jennifer suggested Mommy and Me Yoga. She had taken the class before going back to work and had a few passes left.

It didn’t seem like a good idea. I’d tried yoga once in high school. I had been going through a bad anxiety spell, and my father thought that yoga might help relieve my stress. When I pointed out to him that I could barely touch my knees, let alone my feet, he said not to worry.

I worried. I knew yoga was wrong for me from the very first ommm. The two teachers were a mother and son team, and the son took his yoga seriously. He had a goatee and a ponytail, and I can still see the baffled expression on his face as he tried to wrestle my limbs into places they had no intention of going. I don’t think he had ever seen such an inflexible human before.

“Just stretch,” the son said.

“That’s as far as I go,” I said.

I am even stiffer now than I was then, but what really made me nervous about Mommy and Me Yoga was the potential for emasculation. I have always been proud of my stereotypically feminine attributes. When guy friends made fun of my interest in feminist folk music or pointed out that my winter coat was actually a woman’s coat—I was aware of this, but it was unusually warm—I always insisted that my womanly ways were really a testament to how profoundly secure I was in my manhood. And yet by attending Mommy and Me Yoga classes, I thought I might be taking it to another level. I wondered if I might be crossing an inviolable line into a realm where no heterosexual man could safely travel.

In the end I decided I would rather be emasculated than lonely. And that is how I found myself walking through Brooklyn with Isaac Björned to my chest, a Starbucks skim latte in one hand and a rolled-up purple yoga mat in the other.

When I arrived at the yoga studio, a dozen or so moms had already unrolled their mats onto the hardwood floor and placed their babies in front of them on blankets. In the center of the room—the mosh pit, I would later hear it called—a few of the more mobile babies were manhandling a small mountain of toys.

As I had expected, no other dads had shown up, and I felt increasingly anxious as the instructor, Trish, stepped in front of the mosh pit and introduced herself. Trish had short red hair and thin muscled arms. She looked tough.

I glanced down at Isaac, lying on his back on a blanket, and suddenly longed to be back at home playing Claw Daddy’s Eyes Out.

Trish asked us to close our eyes and ommm. The sound echoed through the sunlit room, and for a brief moment, I allowed myself to relax, one deep breath at a time.

Then Isaac freaked out.

I felt guilty. The world must have seemed strange and surprising enough without all the people in the room suddenly closing their eyes and humming in unison.

Trish waited for Isaac to calm down and then began to bark out impossibly long Sanskrit words. The moms, to my amazement, seemed to speak Sanskrit. No sooner would Trish say “Parivrtta Ardha Chandrasana” than the moms would be balancing on one leg and turning their bodies parallel to the floor. I did my best to keep up, but with each additional Parivrtta Ardha Chandrasana, it became increasingly obvious that in a roomful of mothers, many of them still recovering from the physical trauma of labor, I was without question the least physically fit student.

Trish occasionally stopped by to adjust me this way and that, but her efforts were no match for my rigidity. The Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz could have made me look bad on a yoga mat. By the fifteen-minute mark, I was drenched in sweat and exhausted. And my desperate situation was only made worse when one of the more mobile babies crawled over to say hello and then—even as I waved my cutesiest wave—took off with my water bottle.

With the exception of this one tiny hooligan, the babies remained mostly calm, including Isaac, who had become otherwise engaged with a crinkly-paper-filled caterpillar. But the tranquility came to an abrupt halt during a grueling round of Bharadvajasanas. A baby on the other side of the room began to shriek as if it were he, and not I, who was being asked to rotate his torso 180 degrees. The shriek set off a chain reaction, and soon all of the babies were grunting and crying in unison, a discordant mockery of the ommming adults.

I’d like to think that babies cry in response to one another’s cries out of empathy, that in their shared tears they reveal something profound about the innate capacity of humans to feel the pain of others. And it might be the case. But I also can’t help but wonder if what appears to be empathy is anxiety. Judging by the volume of Isaac’s screams, he is either the next Mother Teresa or he was genuinely terrified.

Even as the other babies calmed down, Isaac continued to fuss in my arms. After the colic months, I never thought the time would come when I wouldn’t mind Isaac’s crying. But the longer he complained, the longer it would be until I had to do another downward dog. So I wasn’t thrilled when Trish came by and offered to take him off my hands for a few minutes. I reluctantly handed over my son and then looked on in horror as he began to suck on Trish’s bare shoulder.

I knew from experience what was coming next, and I should have stopped it. Instead, I collapsed onto my mat and looked on as Isaac gave Trish a bright red arm hickey.

Trish took the hickey as well as a person can take an unsolicited hickey. “I’d rather get one from him than a lot of other guys,” she said. She handed Isaac back to me and then asked us all to lie down with our babies and to position foam bricks under our backs so that they were aligned with our “bra straps.”

With those two words, my emasculation was nearly complete, but as I lay down with Isaac and waited for our next instruction, I saw an opportunity for redemption. I began to bench press Isaac up and down, ostensibly to entertain him but really to demonstrate that there was at least one physical feat at which I could outdo a mother who was still recovering from giving birth.

To my frustration, no one seemed especially interested in my great show of virility, and after about fifteen Isaac reps, I joined the others in what struck me as the weirdest exercise of the afternoon. Trish asked us to form a circle, hold our babies in front of us, and then swing them right to left so that they came face to face with the babies on either side of them.

I could almost hear the “Check, please!” on Isaac’s lips.

After about five minutes of baby-swinging, Trish told us to return to our mats. There was still half an hour left in the class, and I felt as though I was one Bharadvajasana away from passing out.

I picked Isaac up and approached Trish at the front of the room. “I should probably go,” I said. “He looks like he’s getting

tired.”

Sam Apple is on the faculty of the MA in Science Writing and MA in Writing programs at Johns Hopkins. He is the author of Ravenous, Schlepping Through the Alps, and American Parent. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, The MIT Technology Review, and McSweeney's, among many other publications.