October 15 – 19 “People who expose fraud are often ostracized and harassed and may find themselves fired or blacklisted. They have stress-related health problems, including shingles, psoriasis, autoimmune disorders, panic attacks, asthma, insomnia, temporomandibular joint disorder, migraine headaches, and generalized anxiety.” Christie examines why whistleblowers do it anyway. Cassie explains why people run marathons […]
Month: October 2012
Publications are funny creatures. I’ve worked for quite a few, mostly magazines, and each has had its own personality, its style of groupthink. Unlike a traditionally-structured corporation, its collective identity and mandate is vague, shifting as the names change and migrate upward on the masthead. The cover above is from the first fledgling magazine I […]
As part of LWON’s unintended series on science and art, or maybe its focus on unexpected behavior in physicists, please meet David Kaplan. He’s a Johns Hopkins theorist whose specialty is creating the theories beyond the theory that almost accounts for all the matter and energy in the universe. As such, he was involved in […]
In August, I took my almost-four-year-old daughter to the dinosaur galleries in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The ceilings were lower and the clientele was shorter than I remembered from my own childhood, but the essentials were the same: the bones, the horns, the talons, and best of all, the enormous teeth. […]
Fiscal year 2012 was a record year for whistleblowers. According to the Taxpayers Against Fraud Educational Fund, the U.S. government recovered more than $9 billion through lawsuits invoking the False Claims Act, legislation that gives private citizens the right to sue those that commit fraud against government programs (and share in any fines that are eventually collected). A […]
Here’s my ideal Sunday morning: Wake up at 10 am, drink coffee, read, hit the farmer’s market, make brunch. Here’s what I did yesterday morning: Woke up at 7am, consumed a carefully calculated quantity of carbs, ran 20 miles, and plunged myself, fully clothed, into a bathtub of ice water. That’s what a lot of […]
October 8 – 12 This week, Christie remembered Karen, and reminded us that the “beating cancer” narrative is pernicious and false. From his review, I can’t tell if Richard liked Einstein on the Beach, or endured it. Tom tells us about a book made at scales small that light particles are too fat for perception. […]
In the photo, Karen is smiling. We’re clowning around, engulfed in a spring day with nowhere to be but out on our bikes. Breast cancer has already pushed its way into Karen’s life, but the demon is on hiatus, and she has gleefully stuffed her bra to announce that cancer can take her breasts but […]
