January 29 – February 2, 2018 Craig begins the week: he believes tarot cards? well, he believes chaos theory, he believes systems can organize themselves when smaller parts interact, he’s risking serious woo here, but sure, why not? Rose’s dog is well-behaved, trustworthy, doesn’t even bark. Rose’s dog was not always this way. Once Rose’s […]
We’re a little late this morning: the post is about a paper that’s embargoed until 9 a.m. eastern. Please come back then, please.
The Awl died. Or will die, in a couple of weeks. It was/is a website with the usual internet attitude – an awl, dear children, is a sharp pointed instrument for punching holes — but not the usual internet manners. My Twitter feed is full of writers who were young a few years ago, who […]
Last week Michelle wrote that, given the speed of change in the reality under the science, climatology needed some new words, and she proposed a beauty: “antevernal,” meaning “daffodils blooming in February.” To back her word-making, she quoted a naturalist: “If the language we use to speak of the natural world is not innovative and […]
Well now then. Here we are. The first day of another year. What to do about that? January 1 is a day for looking forward. Kids mostly look forward, I think. But any adult knows you make sense of any given situation only by looking back, by remembering. Memory allows the comparison between then and […]
This was posted September 24, 2015. I go later to the coffeeshop now and don’t run into Larry and John, its chief scientists. I do have an update on neighborhood-kid questions though. “Why does this blue flower have a yellow dot in the center?” “Why do birds poop?” “Why are there ants going up the […]
UPDATE, 10/27/2020: This post is about, among other things, Peter Ganz, a German philologist with an unlikely personal history. One of his sons, Adam, just wrote telling me about a centenary at Oxford University that celebrates Peter’s accomplishments. I thought you might like to know. I mean, the man left Buchenwald, then helped spy on […]
November 27 – December 1, 2017 Michelle, hoping to inoculate her daughter and everybody else’s daughter against rampant and pervasive patriarchy, compiles a girl-centric list of bedtime reading. After all, the holidays loom, presents will be given. Erik kills plants. He doesn’t mean to, though to be honest he doesn’t love them all that much. But […]