The first time I heard about bacterial photography, I thought, “Wow, that’s so rad! I’m not sure what they’re gonna use it for, but anyway, it sure is cool!” The bacterial photography project involved transplanting a light sensor into an Escherichia coli bacterium so that it could take “pictures” in Petri dishes. It sprang from […]
Month: June 2011
A few years ago, I interviewed author and social critic James Kunstler about his novel World Made By Hand, his latest portrayal of a post-peak-oil future. Kunstler, as one might expect, had plenty of complaints — about suburbs, cheese doodles, Wal-Mart, the American road trip. But when I mentioned that I’d grown up in the […]
Please welcome Michelle Nijhuis, the newest Person of LWON—and, given her street address, the one least likely to be stalked in the physical world. Michelle seems to spend a great deal of her time winning awards and fellowships, but that’s not why we like her. Rather, it’s because of the moments she sets aside to […]
I’m not a big fan of conferences. I loathe spending vast stretches of time indoors, especially if it requires planting my butt in uncomfortable chairs and wearing clothes with buttons and shoes that aren’t flip flops. Yet I continue to attend meetings, because they offer opportunities to interact with smart people who are thinking about […]
Today I have the pleasure of introducing the latest addition to LWON: Christie Aschwanden (ASH-wand-un), a writer who shares not only my fondness for the term “bull honkey,” but also my intense dislike of liars. Yes, we are two peas in a pod. Except Christie, a serious athlete and professional ski racer, is really buff. […]
Erika wants to know about the state of autism research. “How is the field doing in terms of rigorous science?” she asks. “What is the most promising theory about how autism develops?” The first question’s easy to answer: pretty damn well. In 2008 (the last time a good survey was done), autism research reaped $144 […]
Today, I’ll wrestle with a question that Ann posed during our birthday celebration: People have been living and building things in North America for tens of thousands of years, the same tens of thousands that they’ve been in India, China, Egypt, Mesoamerica, Europe; so why do we know comparatively so little about North American paleolithics? […]
Last week Jessa wrote about psychiatric diagnoses moving from the quantum to the continuum, from neat little packages to subtleties that include shades of gray and something called “a quantifiable baseline of life functioning.” The same week, Ginny published a story about the same diagnostic changes but applied specifically to pathological grief – the problem […]
