My 16-year-old son has started to drive. He holds a learner’s permit, which means he can’t drive without me sitting in the passenger seat. Me, narrating, reminding, commenting, coaching, evaluating, and reinforcing. We haven’t done much highway driving yet, so I haven’t directly addressed the idea of breaking the law — which almost everybody on […]
Month: February 2013
In the first week of September 1942, 29-year-old Libertas Schultze-Boysen waited desperately for word of her husband Harro, an official in the Reich Aviation Ministry in Berlin. The couple had passionately espoused a cause that few Germans of the age dared even to discuss. With a small group of friends, Libertas and Harro organized a […]
11 – 15 February This week, Erik had a fascinating look at the people who think wind turbines are making them ill. Cameron explained why alligators never have to worry about shrinkage. Abstruse Goose neatly captured the infinite regress that tortures us science writers. I told you how gross bugs do Valentine’s day. And Richard […]
We now return to our occasionally-scheduled Thank God It’s Penis Friday. The alligator harvest at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge happened every September, so in the fall of 2007, Diane Kelly packed her bags. She wasn’t hunting, but she still had to put her scalpels and knife blades and the rest of her dissection kit in […]
I’m not a big fan of Valentine’s day, but I love the ads. They are so utterly, transparently awful that they cross the line from crassly offensive into entertaining. Business Insider just did a brilliant roundup of the worst offenders of all time. They have a certain evolutionary-psychology simplicity to them — if you present […]
Last year, I published a series critical of modern wind farms. They dealt with a number of pretty dirty land deals in southern Mexico related to new wind farms. Although they were on the cover of a major national newspaper, they didn’t get the attention I thought they deserved (as with most of my stories, […]
I was browsing online a couple of months ago when I came across the headline, “Petula Clark Turns 80.” What? That’s not possible. I remember when she was part of the British invasion, an icon of Swinging London, a mainstay of the Top Forty. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing “Downtown” or “Don’t Sleep in the Subway” […]
In spite of AG’s title, this is really Science Writing 101. The first time science writers run across these infinitely receding questions is when they start researching a story and the story is all parts and no whole. The next time is when they start asking scientists questions and every answer just means another question. […]
