The Finkbeiner Test for gender-neutrality in science reporting took flight last week, offering female scientists the hope of having their work represented in print without gratuitous pink sprayed all over it. A scientist’s partner’s profession and their family responsibilities are irrelevant unless specifically shown otherwise. But now, I find myself with another journalistic quandary: Strict […]
I have to admit, that very first episode of Survivor, oh so many years ago, held a certain wow factor for me. I was amazed they were allowed to do such a thing, back when it appeared as if they were truly going to leave a group of people to their own devices on a […]
In my early twenties, I had a really good break-up with someone whom I considered to be part of my chosen family. “Amicable” doesn’t even capture the “Friends forever!” commitment with which we launched into our post-couple bond. The thought of him having a new girlfriend made me excited for him: Nobody had told us […]
Water level rises, a river is fuller and fuller, until it’s something else, and the world is transformed. It’s a threshold effect: when quantitative sliding becomes qualitative step change. I’m lucky that on this map, my house falls in the light-blue rim of the darker floodplain, protected by a high-walled canal. I’ll only get washed away […]
In 1850, British Captain Robert McClure and his crew ventured in the Investigator to the Arctic, with a walrus-shaped figurehead leading the way in search of the lost Franklin expedition. Unlike ill-fated Franklin, McClure employed an Inuit translator and was able to engage meaningfully with coastal communities along the Arctic Ocean. The team found and […]
It’s amazing what scientists can do nowadays. They can get right down into the center of an atom. They can tell us in detail about rocks on other planets. So it’s no wonder when they report there are a certain number of very large animals in an area – and they only have to count […]
Publications are funny creatures. I’ve worked for quite a few, mostly magazines, and each has had its own personality, its style of groupthink. Unlike a traditionally-structured corporation, its collective identity and mandate is vague, shifting as the names change and migrate upward on the masthead. The cover above is from the first fledgling magazine I […]
A Northern engineer once wrote that if you want to build a house in the Arctic, place a window overlooking every direction from which a bear might come and a door on the opposite side. Architecture, due to the immovable nature of its products, should be one of the most locally-attuned disciplines in the professional […]