Ezra Kaplan

Ezra wrote for a science desk for six years before going independent. He covers the research side of the lexicon — REM cycles, memory consolidation, why the brain rehearses threats at 3 a.m. He cites his sources, flags the weak studies, and has never once used the word 'unlock'. His beat taught him a durable habit: read the methods section before the abstract, and read the sample size before either. He brings that discipline to a field that badly needs it — dream research is full of small studies with large headlines, and Ezra's job, as he sees it, is to tell readers which findings would survive a replication and which are one lab's interesting Tuesday. His entries map what is actually settled: that sleep consolidates memory, that REM seems to do emotional processing work, that the threat-simulation account of nightmares is a serious hypothesis and not a fact. He writes plainly about uncertainty because he thinks certainty is what pseudoscience sells. Off the page, he is a careful sleeper and an unremarkable dreamer, which he considers a professional advantage: no favorite theory to protect. What keeps him interested after six years is the scale of the open question — a third of every human life, still mostly unmapped, still generating data every single night.

Writes about: sleep science, dream research, neuroscience of sleep.

Elsewhere: ezrakaplan.substack.com