One of the greatest gifts the holidays bring is a brief window of uninterrupted time — just enough to lose oneself in a book or a TV series, guilt free. Today we offer up our recommendations for things to watch this year. Jessa: To Be and To Have (Être et avoir) A documentary crew installs […]
Month: December 2014
December 14-19, 2014 In the second half of Ann’s reflections on Marvin “Murph” Goldberger, the subject turns from academic life to Jason, the group of physicists who advised the US government on science, including tactics to be used in the Vietnam War. As before, she lets Murph do the talking. Press release-driven science journalism is […]
Two years ago this week, a well-known environmental organizer named Sombath Somphone was detained at a traffic stop in downtown Vientiane, Laos, and driven away in a white pickup. He has not been seen or heard from since. You can read a lot more about Somphone, his work in Laos, and his wife’s remarkable efforts to […]
1. Write late at night, preferably the night before your deadline. That’s when the creative juices will really be churning. Your gut will be churning too. With panic. 2. Don’t write the whole piece in one fell swoop. Focus on a single sentence. Make sure that sentence is perfect before you move on to the […]
Not long ago, walking past some court buildings with a friend, I kept stopping to pick up paper clips. Besides the usual little Gem clips, like ACCO Brand Trombones No 1, I found a black-and-silver binder clip and a rare angel-shaped “ideal clamp”–all of them no doubt carelessly dropped by lawyers who once used them […]
Newsflash — Press releases about medical studies may contain hype. That was the conclusion of a report published last week in the medical journal BMJ. Petroc Sumner, a professor at Cardiff University, compared 462 press releases on medical studies from leading United Kingdom universities in 2011 and found that 33 to 40 percent of the […]
Part 1 is here. While Murph was still at Princeton, in his first years there, he was spending summers consulting, sometimes for defense contractors, sometimes for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. (A lot of physicists did this: academic scientists’ salaries run for nine months; they needed summer money.) Then a little later, during the post-Sputnik years, […]
Christie tells Ira Glass a story that ends up on the cutting room floor. Now, listening to the hit podcast Serial, Christie gets why. Each personal story has to fit the larger mission of the show. “I was only capable of telling my story from inside the moment — with details that gave away the punchline before […]
