Yesterday I was at a science fiction symposium on London City Island, a strange, clean little post-industrial peninsula in the Docklands. A small group of academics had gathered – the sorts of people who get PhDs in science fiction studies – to consider the question: If science fiction is about the future, what is the […]
Month: September 2022
The other day, a fellow writer shared a link to a residency opportunity in a science writing group. Like most residencies, the situation sounded ideal — a few weeks in an idyllic place where you’d have peace and quiet to delve into a big project and meet other writers. I looked at the logistics: the […]
I’m late to the party when it comes to S-Town, the hit Serial Productions podcast about Alabama polymath John McLemore, who dies half way through the series having suffered mercury poisoning from years of back-woods chemical artisanship. It made me think about all of those passionate, brilliant people society never quite manages to harness, who […]
It’s the spider time of year, the webs are everywhere and the little spiders are sneaking into the house. Sneaking is bad enough but then you learn that some spiders fly — paraglide, actually, crossed with hot-air ballooning. Just no. This post first ran on April 19, 2018. Most spring days on my favorite walk, […]
Behold this mighty tree! It’s in an unassuming bit of woods near my parents’ house in Silver Spring, Md. So unassuming, in fact, that this December 2021 visit was the first time I had set foot in that particular bit of woods, and my family moved to the neighborhood in 1985. The local parks folks […]
Bryn Nelson is a Seattle-based science writer whose book, Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure, came out September 13. Yes, that’s right–it’s a book about poop. So of course, Helen and Cameron wanted to take a deep dive into this important (seriously!) topic. Here’s our conversation with Bryn, which has been lightly edited […]
A couple of years ago, on this very site, I related the legend of the Egg Dog — basically, how my beloved companion, Kit, had an uncanny predilection for finding and delivering the eggs laid by our neighborhood chickens. Since then, I’ve resisted the temptation to document all of Kitty’s exploits, which, believe me, are […]
We’re thinking about Queen Elizabeth these days, or at least I am. She just soldiered on, didn’t she — did her duty. That word, duty, isn’t as popular as it used to be and maybe that’s good, maybe not. The Queen certainly never stopped doing it, I’ll bet she died thinking about her duty. Anyway, […]
