We have a lot to learn about “Nom nom nom.” Consider the user comments for a homemade YouTube video called “Cute Kitten says ‘YUM YUM YUM’ while eating.” They include “That is one Happy cat :),” “Awwww,” and “MELTING IN HAPPINESS.” Only a few recognize the meaning of the growling noises as the cat eats from […]
Commentary
Regular readers of LWON know that I’m fed up with science denialism among breast cancer advocacy groups like Susan G. Komen for the Cure®. As I write in the Washington Post today, I’m also exasperated with my doctor (one I won’t be going back to). I’ve been reporting on breast cancer and mammography for more […]
For most of the interviews we do, sources will be disappointed by what comes out. And we journalist are mostly okay with this because those are the rules of the game. But every so often a person gets a little […]
Last July I ended a post on the Higgs boson with an admonition: “Just don’t get me started on this ‘God particle’ business.” But did Christie listen? “I’m sharing it with my husband,” she emailed me about the post. “This whole ‘god particle’ thing has been driving him completely crazy.” The term, at least in the […]
LWON loves this 10/20/2011 post and is reprinting it, feeling that we’re always at any time just a minute away from our own Hubble moments. In 2006, when I was in graduate school for science writing, one of my professors brought in an astronomer to talk about his exoplanet discoveries (just in case you don’t […]
David Brooks has done it again. In his New York Times op-ed column last Monday, Brooks portrayed psychiatry as a “semi-science” suffering from “Physics Envy.” He pointed to the publication of the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—or DSM-5—as evidence that psychiatry misrepresents itself as hard science. The column opens, “We’re living in an empirical age,” and it goes […]
I am just sitting down to dinner at makeshift cafeteria a few miles away from a Maya dig site, called Xultun, in the jungles of Northern Guatemala. It’s my third day there, and I am still not used to the howler monkeys and giant insects. But most of the students around me have been here […]
On September 11, 2001, I was visiting a teacher in a one-room school in Kikijana, Bolivia, a tiny community nestled high in the mountains. After school let out, the teacher switched on a battery-operated radio. The broadcast was in Quechua, a language I don’t really speak, so I tuned out. But the teacher was listening. […]