You finish the book, you don’t want it to be over with, there’s still one more printed page, so you read it. “A Note on the Type,” it says, and heads off into the highest weeds: the name of the font in which the book is printed, then the font’s forebears, its continuing history, its […]
Because Sarah wrote about grief on Monday and because today my son would have been 51, so then what else would I bother writing about except grief or rather grief as love’s subset or corollary or unavoidable consequence. Love → grief, love ꝏ grief. That little ꝏ sign, that side-ways 8, that’s the math/astro symbol […]
This first ran on Sept. 6, 2012. My nephew was then a biology graduate student; he is now a fully-functioning scientist. He is confident, self-collected, easy to talk to, curious — in short, he made it through his education in one piece. But the education itself has not changed — not the advice, not the […]
This post first ran on June 12, 2018. The need to think about predation and empathy — equal but opposite responses to vulnerability — is alive and kicking. But the online magazine referred to at the end is dead. Early last week on Twitter, some National Security Agency posters showed up, reminding NSA employees to […]
@nattyover: I turn for comfort to “A Dying Universe: The Long Term Fate and Evolution of Astrophysical Objects” https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9701131.pdf @nattyover is Natalie Wolchover, science writer and editor at Quanta. “A Dying Universe” is a paper I love and have loved for years. The paper’s abstract: “We consider,” it says, how planets, stars, galaxies, and the […]
The following are excerpts from a profile of Jim Peebles, who just yesterday won a Nobel Prize. Peebles is a quintessential theorist — “I spent a few days standing near telescopes getting cold,” he said, “and in the end, my attention wandered” — whose opinion of his own theories is finely balanced. The profile is […]
Update: this movie, Particle Fever, ended up winning a ton of awards, being shown at a ton of film festivals including Telluride, being reviewed in a ton of surprised and delighted publications including the New York Times, and generally ending up exactly the way you’d want it to. This post ran October 18, 2012, before […]
Ann: The first thing I have to say is, that is a glorious title. Was it yours? I ask because with every book I’ve written, the title was a matter of intense negotiations which I usually lost, and I wonder how you got away with such elegance and relevance both. Chris: It was my editor’s […]
