Today (October 29), I went skiing for the first time this season. Yesterday I drove up to the top of the Mesa to check out conditions, and the ground was completely bare in the sunny spots, with just an inch or less of snow in the shady spots. What a difference a day makes! When […]
Christie
On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow […]
I’d been pondering the consequences of modern self-chronicling when Facebook sent me its rendering of my life in 2014. If Facebook’s Year End Review is any indication, my life boils down to this: adorable dogs, skiing, trail running and mountain biking. Lots of mountain biking. The scenes that Facebook selected as highlights certainly were fun times, and […]
This post first ran on January 26, 2012. Since then, we’ve continued to set records for the hottest year on record. My question began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote: At what point does a “drought” become an “arid climate?” Paolo posed his question months ago, and at first glance, it seemed like […]
Recently I had what Cassie has dubbed a “Hubble moment.” I’ve been on the board of directors at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing for at least a decade, but had somehow never grasped the fine print of how our Taylor Blakeslee fellowship came to be. I knew it was named after two […]
I used to think AI was a hyped-up distraction. I thought it would do a clumsy job of things, and be annoying, but mostly harmless. I’ve changed my mind. What initiated my change of mind was playing around with some AI tools. After trying out chatGPT and Google’s AI tool, I’ve now come to the […]
I have a personal policy: never read the comments. And when my book was published last year, I quickly learned that I probably didn’t want to take note of the reader reviews at Amazon either. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love hearing from readers. Nothing makes me happier than receiving a personal note from someone […]
It began with a software engineer in India. The man’s email signature says that he works in “Dreams Sustainment (Offshore).” His note with the subject line “Regarding INC5760131” referred to some technical issue that was virtually incomprehensible to anyone who was not among the email’s intended recipients. And there were a lot of unintended recipients. Somehow this […]