For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are choosing our own most daunting science-related subjects and writing about why they scare us. My father wasn’t a physicist, but he could work wonders with gravity. He’d be showing me how to change a flat, or fix […]
Commentary
“Well, you know we only use about 10 per cent of our brain.” I don’t like when people tell me this. Someday, I hope to acquire the guts to issue the following rejoinder: “Which 10 per cent do you use?” But because I don’t like confrontation, I usually just make a face of mute disappointment […]
For the holiday season, we here at LWON discussed a series of Secret Santa posts: we would assign one another posts about our own areas of specialization so, say, archeology might be assigned to an eco-writer. Fear erupted. What if I get biology? What if I get physics? Count me out! Then we realized: we could confront […]
The other day I was casually perusing the internet and I happened on this article by the National Journal. In it, they ask 1,000 Americans for three words describing Mexico. Seventy two percent described their neighbor to the south with “drugs,” “danger,” “cartel,” “crime” or “violence.” For someone living in Mexico City, this is sad […]
I recently learned that my colleagues think I am a coward. And even more recently, I learned that I might agree with them. It all began in 2007. That was a magic year for science writers. That was the year the IPCC released its crushing assessment on climate change, just after the surprise hit of […]
The end of the world has been preying on my mind lately. Not in a religious, horsemen-of-the-apocalypse way ‒— but in a more surviving-the-failure-of-modern-amenities way. One reason for this preoccupation is my generation’s fascination not only with zombie film and literature1 but with interactive zombie games, like elaborate tag variation humans vs zombies, races with […]
Last week the journalism world was buzzing about — guess who? — Jonah Lehrer. Yes, again. We knew about the science writer’s self-plagiarism and Bob-Dylan-quote fabrication. Last week a New York Magazine exposé by Boris Kachka claimed that Lehrer also deliberately misrepresented other people’s ideas. Kachka’s piece led to some fascinating discussions about whether it’s possible to […]
I go to a lot of natural history museums. Something about all those pretty rocks and dead animals, and the chance that I might see something I’ve never seen before or learn something new—I can’t resist it. In the last three years, I’ve been to at least 15 natural history museums on two continents. Here’s […]