In all my obsessive reading about combat sport – the ghost-written memoirs and swaggering comment threads – one concept has always stumped me. Time and again a story of a fight takes as its pivotal moment the breaking of a fighter’s will. Or take this account: “I was beating him up, but I don’t think […]
Michelle and Jessa converse about the reasons we chose to stop at one child. Jessa: So let me check I have it right: you’re an only child yourself and have an only child as well? Michelle: That’s right, and I always thought that if I became a parent I would have an only kid. I […]
In communicating, we make decisions — judgment calls about the listener’s own knowledge. It’s something we develop in childhood, the “theory of mind” that allows for imagining the world from another’s point of view and subsequently for meeting people where they’re at. Nevertheless, in covering specialist topics, it can be tough to know what the […]
There’s nothing like a stagnating job search to make you question your calling in life. I’ve been staring at the title “science journalist” for a couple of months now, and every time the words look more alien to me. The fact is, though I have a passionate interest in making science accessible to the public […]
As a journalist, I tend to be wary of people trying to assign me stories if they’re not an editor, and sometimes even then. Public relations types try to do it all the time. They send press releases with pre-packaged quotations for the deadline-driven writer or call up with some brilliant story idea […]
After more than five years in the Canadian North, I’m preparing a move south to Toronto, before the next winter descends. Writing about science up here has been the best gig of my career – there’s just so much science here and so few science journalists. In my research in this part of the world, […]
There’s a long-standing affirmative action program in Canada’s North that prescribes the preferential hiring of local residents – that is, people who have lived more than half of their lives in the North, regardless of ethnicity. It’s long been a puzzle to me, as an ex-pat Southerner who still considers herself a citizen. Surely the […]
The college year in Japan starts in October, so in the fall of 1999 I had an extra month of summer vacation. It was going to be tough committing to a year in such a different place, while navigating a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend in Toronto, but life is for adventure. I arrived at […]