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 […]
Commentary
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. […]
I grew up in L.A., but 25 years ago I sold my car and moved to Paris. I’ve had few regrets since, although I do return every year to see my old friends. Each visit reminds me that Angelenos don’t have much to be proud of, especially when they have to sit in traffic for […]
In an obituary for veteran rocket scientist Yvonne Brill this weekend, the New York Times disastrously failed science writer Christie Aschwanden’s Finkbeiner test for profiling scientists. She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew […]
