America’s Smartest Couple

In the United States, there is a couple who are known as "the smartest couple in America."

Her husband is the director of the Center for Cognitive Neurology at MIT and a professor of psychology at Harvard University; he once bravely defended Harvard University President Lawrence Summers. He has received more than 10 NSF and other funds, published more than ten books such as "Language Instinct" and "The Nature of Thought", hundreds of academic articles, and received six honorary doctorates.

His wife holds a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. She received the MacArthur Genius Grant in 1996 and is the author of "36 Proofs of the Existence of God" and "Plato at Google Headquarters".

They are cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker and philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstain.

In 2014, the couple gave a TED talk together for Goldstein's new book, and an animation featuring the two as the protagonists was played. In the film, they walk and eat together while discussing philosophical issues. The speech took the form of a dialogue and was titled "The Long March of Reason." Later, the two of them wrote recommendations for Richard Dawkins's autobiography Brief Candle in the Dark, and their names appeared together on the cover of the book. Sure enough, Daniel's style of showing affection is also unique.

Speaking of their acquaintance, it was also full of drama.

Pinker cited the irregular verb "stridden" from Goldstein's novel in an example in his book Words and Rules, and they met in 2007. marry. Goldstein admired Pinker so much that she said no thinker since David Hume had moved her. But Pinker was an exception.

The union with Goldstein was Pink's third marriage.

In 1954, Pinker was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Quebec, Canada. His grandparents immigrated to Canada from Poland and Bessarabia. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a housewife who later became the vice principal of a high school. He has a brother and a sister. The younger brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government, and the younger sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer, and is the author of the best-selling books "The Sexual Paradox" and "The Village Effect" .

It must be said that the Pinker family has achieved very high achievements, perhaps due to the family’s high-quality genes and the material foundation of the middle class.

Pink married Nancy Etoff at the age of 26. They divorced 12 years later. Three years later, he married Ilavenil Subbiah, which also ended in divorce. Finally in 2007, Pink married Goldstein, who was four years older than him.

Pinker and his three wives had no children, only two stepdaughters brought by Goldstein.

Unlike Pinker, who was born in Canada, Goldstein grew up in the United States. She married physicist Sheldon Goldstein (not Sheldon Cooper) when she was 19, and they had two daughters. Thirty years later, the marriage broke up due to the long separation between the couple.

Goldstein’s two daughters, one is the novelist Yael Goldstein, are also engaged in digital platform publishing. In addition, her studio has also made a product that supports the ios7 system. Reading app. Another daughter, Daniel, is a poet.

In 2004, Pinker was selected as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine. In 2005, he was selected as one of the 100 most famous public intellectuals. . Now he is recognized as a great thinker and cognitive psychologist in the world.

When he was in his 50s, he had already written a lot and achieved the achievements mentioned at the beginning of the article. It is not an exaggeration to call him a genius. Many psychology and linguistics students also take him as a benchmark.

The standard configuration of the American middle class has always been "a house, a yard, two children and a dog." Pink is 62 years old this year, but has never had children of his own. In Pinker's work, many of the arguments are related to evolutionary psychology and even to the theory of evolution itself. I don’t know if there is too much research on the genetic level, but I have lost interest in continuing genes.

Many people have two or more marriages, and multiple marriages seem to be more common among celebrities. Many people are very lucky to find lifelong happiness in their first marriage, but there are also many people who spend their entire lives looking for their soul mate.

We don’t know more details, and we can’t find more detailed information about his first two wives. But we know that Pinker and Goldstein, a psychologist and a philosopher, have been tireless in their journey to find soul mates and pursue truth.