ast weekend, my friend Sarah Gilman won the women’s woodsplitting competition at the 41st annual Mountain Fair in Carbondale, Colo., out-chopping several close rivals — including a local county commissioner — and taking home a championship tiara and an six-pound splitting maul. It was Sarah’s second tiara, and second prize maul; she first won […]
This story, I promise, will end with giant deep-sea tubeworms like the beauties above. Please bear with me while I get there via the Colorado River. I’m one of the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado for water, and for most of my adult life I’ve heard about (and reported on) the bureaucratic […]
My rural Colorado town, pop. 1,500 on a good day, is in many ways a laboratory-scale model of the U.S.A. We worship both community ties and unfettered independence. We’re gossipy and private, inclusive and provincial, divided by class and dogma even as we gather under our purple mountains majesty. Our community stew comes to a […]
I first encountered lionfish on Carrie Bow Cay, a hurricane-battered scrap of an island 15 miles off the coast of Belize. The rotating crew of biologists on Carrie Bow work hard and play hard, and one popular form of play is lionfish hunting: spearing, cooking, and enthusiastically devouring these stripey fellows on the left. Lionfish […]
Ever since I reviewed Ignorance: How it Drives Science, a charming new book by the Columbia neuroscientist Stuart Firestein, I’ve been thinking about ignorance. And I tell you, it’s been a bit of a headache. Firestein teaches a popular science class at Columbia, also called Ignorance, in which he invites scientists from different disciplines to talk […]
Earlier this year, during a reporting trip in West Virginia, I happened upon the tiny Watts Museum, a mining-history gallery tucked into West Virginia University’s sprawling Mineral Resources building. Its advertised exhibit, “Defying the Darkness,” detailed the history of mine illumination. Mine illumination? I pictured engineering blueprints and exhibit cases filled with switches and bulbs. […]
There are poems about science. There are poems about scientists. But I know of only two poems about women scientists — about women doing science, that is — and both were written by the same person: the brilliant, defiant, influential poet Adrienne Rich, who died last week at the age of 82. From “Power“: Today […]
When J. Allen Williams, Jr., was a boy in Chapel Hill, N.C., his mother loved to read the children’s classic The Secret Garden to him and his brother. The story, about an orphaned girl and her friends who restore an abandoned garden on an English estate, led Williams and his brother to dig and plant […]