Last week, I left New York and headed for my home state of North Dakota. The plan was to fly to Minneapolis and then ride the rest of the way with my dad and stepmom, who were driving in from Wisconsin. Just before I headed to the airport, I sent my dad a text. I’m […]
Commentary
You probably heard about last week’s Nature study on older dads and autism; it got a lot of attention. The basic findings were fascinating but, in my opinion, far less sensational than what most of the news articles would have us believe. The researchers, led by Kári Stefánsson of deCODE Genetics in Iceland, showed that the average 20-year-old man passes on […]
We here at LWON have been all over this and we (ok, I) agree completely with AG: astrobiologists out-compete evolutionary psychologists for getting the most publicity out of the least evidence. Also I just ran across an interesting but illogical argument: if the principles of physics, chemistry, and geology “work beyond our planet,” why not […]
The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán is not the biggest monument you can imagine. In fact, it’s dwarfed by the hills around it that it is meant to reflect. It’s cut into four levels, each of which is about the same as a couple flights of stair in a New York apartment building. But […]
One evening during a recent visit to Santiago, Chile, I went to dinner with two colleagues. Afterward, as I descended the stairs of the Metro to cross Providencia Avenue, I saw a young girl, no more than five years old, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sitting on the ground. She was holding out a shoe […]
My rural Colorado town, pop. 1,500 on a good day, is in many ways a laboratory-scale model of the U.S.A. We worship both community ties and unfettered independence. We’re gossipy and private, inclusive and provincial, divided by class and dogma even as we gather under our purple mountains majesty. Our community stew comes to a […]
A couple of days ago I was sitting at work when my wife emailed me an article by Adam Ruben. He’s a scientist who writes a humor column for Science. This one was about science journalism. I thought: Hey, I’m a science journalist, I like funny things, should be good. But a few paragraphs in, […]
“Listening to a entrepreneurial physicist talking about how to get rich!” Apparently, that was my first tweet. I’ve got no idea who the physicist was, and the get-rich advice must not have been very good—I’m still in journalism. Yet for all my forgetfulness, Twitter remembers the exact moment I came into its life: March 17, […]
