Van VanderMeer is about to celebrate an anniversary that he’d probably rather forget. In December 2009, VanderMeer thought he had caught his annual winter cough; for a few years in a row, he’d developed a chest cold around this time of year. But this one lingered. VanderMeer was competing in a mixed doubles tournament in […]
Month: November 2011
The city of Milwaukee is not a good place to be an infant. For every 1,000 babies born there, more than 10 die before their first birthday. Among black families, the number is even higher — 14 out of 1,000. The national average is about 6.5. So it’s no wonder the Milwaukee Health Department is […]
Think about this one for a while and see where it gets you. It just got me confused. Translating AG’s Latin title — Time devours things — doesn’t help. John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then the H bomb, helped clarify the atom, made up the phrase “black […]
About an hour into a long interview, the scientist relaxes, stops using words that might look good on a funding application, and starts saying things like: “Here’s a picture of our immediate neighborhood. Here’s the Milky Way, that’s us. Here’s the Andromeda Nebula, that’s our nearest friend. And there are a bunch of little guys […]
When my editor at Slate asked me to look into the link between statins and violent behavior, I thought the idea was crazy. But as I dug into the issue, I decided that there was an important story there. I’m still not entirely convinced that statins cause aggressive or violent behavior in some small subset […]
This fall, I did something that I’ve done only once before in three decades of writing: for two whole weeks I booked off work and took a real vacation. Freelance writers can rarely afford half-month-long holidays. But I had spent a good part of 2010 in cardiac wards, tending to my visibly failing father and watching […]
This needs no explaining. I’m about to march on Wall Street myself.
When I’m thrashing through the brambles of a first draft, no story in sight, I have one reliable lifeline. WWJMD? What would John McPhee do to get himself out of this #%&! mess? This, after all, is the guy who found fascinating stories in citrus cultivation. And geology. And Switzerland! Some of his writing is […]
