My mother has forgotten she wants to die. For as long as I can remember she has been, not exactly planning it, but asserting her right to control her manner of death. When our family gathered for an Easter lunch during my freshman year of college, I announced that I had received a full scholarship […]
Month: October 2026
Tomorrow is international jumping spider day, so I’m taking this as an excuse to tell you about one my favorite jumping spiders, Habronattus pyrrithrix. I was introduced to the species while writing a story about the perceptual world of jumping spiders for Science News. I interviewed visual ecologist Nate Morehouse at the University of Cincinnati. […]
Yesterday Francis Halzen received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for overseeing the experiment that detected an extraordinarily elusive subatomic particle via an ingenious reinterpretation of the concept of “telescope.” A version of this essay about that experiment originally appeared here on November 26, 2013, following the announcement of that discovery. The news this past […]
Grief is a persistent little bugger. It never really goes away, just changes shape. Well after my last book came out without the fanfare I’d hoped for, I’m revisiting a version of grief that I hadn’t known existed, and that’s still with me. It’s no long a dart; I’d say it’s more a smattering of […]
My friend Laura provided me an instructive moment of delight yesterday when she confided that she’d just opened a jar of 2007 “Plum Yum,” a jammy concoction made of Italian prune plums from my orchard. She said she’d been trying to break her lifelong habit of saving special things for special occasions. “Trying to drink […]
