It just happened again. My Twitter mentions blew up, because someone posted a tweet soliciting names of favorite female science writers after most of the students in a science communication class couldn’t come up with a single one. I have no doubt that the tweet was well-intentioned, but all I could think is, oh no, […]
Commentary
A few weeks ago I published a story in Hakai about the hidden story of the ancient maritime Maya. It’s not the first time I’ve written about the Maya – in fact, for a while there it was a bit of an obsession. I’ve always found ancient Mesoamerican history fascinating. Partly, I just love history. […]
I was at the pharmacy the other day, waiting for my flu shot, when I spotted a book called Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…And Maybe the World. It was written by a retired U.S. Navy Admiral. In his tongue in cheek synopsis of the book at the Guardian, John Crace […]
What if instead of eating three meals each day (plus snacks, if you’re me) we just popped pills and moved along with our lives. Food pills were once a staple of science fiction, from Dr. Who to Star Trek to the Jetsons, and I recently did an episode of my podcast Flash Forward about the dream […]
This piece originally ran a year ago, Sept 22, 2018. Right now I’m in the bowels of the Grand Canyon, sending up a flare of a redux. I often think back to this story, especially when violence swells in the world. This is one small antidote. I was with a group kayaking and camping on […]
You know it’s bad when you have to dig a hole and crawl in to survive. That’s what is going on in a creek bed at the bottom of the canyon below where I live. The creek stopped running a little more than a week ago. I walked down the other day and lifted […]
Summer’s been long and hot. Usually, I’m still enjoying it by August, but this time, winter is looking sweeter than ever. This post originally ran in January 27, 2015, and is about being colder than I ever had before, and about a time North America was colder than it had been in thousands of […]
If you know anything about beavers, it’s likely that they build dams. Natures engineers, they’re called. Eager beavers are up and at ‘em, ready to build complex structures with the simplest materials in just the right spot to stop a river from flowing. In fact, engineering schools across the country — MIT, Oregon State, American […]