Oh jeez I should not write about this. I don’t even want to. I’m doing it anyway. It’s this professional tension between senior women astronomers and junior women astronomers which I hear about it from the juniors, not a lot and never loudly, but intensely. I think — I think — I see both sides […]
Behavior
This post originally appeared April 19, 2019 My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit […]
Ann Finkbeiner: My son died, as did my husband; and so did parents and grandparents whom I loved dearly. I’ve written articles and LWON posts about grief, plus a book. So I consider myself a kind of expert, the kind who knows what she’s lived and read and what other people tell her. But I’ve […]
I am not especially fond of Mondays and I never have been, at least since learning of the existence of this artifice. I use the word not to mean fake — because Mondays are quite real — but to define them as made by human hands. In the rest of the universe with its whirling […]
This spring, I listened to an interview with Tiffany Shlain, whose family has spent the last decade-plus observing a tech Shabbat: turning off all their devices for 24 hours, once a week. Back when her book first came out, in 2019, I might not have been as interested. We were those parents who wouldn’t let […]
The other day I was going through someone’s collapsed house on the tip of a mesa in western Colorado. It looked like a small homestead where no one had been in a handful of decades. The front wall with its peaked roof and door still latched shut lay flat where it had fallen. I poked […]
ABSTRACT What is it about watching kids be kids that is so fascinating? That makes us snap too many photos and text other adults or Tweet at the world in the middle of the day about some random or mundane thing they just did? It might have something to do with the infinite enigma of […]
The anniversary week of George Floyd’s murder is a good time to revisit this post, which first appeared June 10, 2020. We still have so far to go, in the United States.