About a month ago, I wrote a review of a play by David C. Cassidy about Farm Hall. Farm Hall was the English country house in which the British government, just after World War II, sequestered the German nuclear scientists they’d kidnapped. The scientists’ rooms were bugged, and their conversation was recorded and transcribed by […]
Conversations
Ben: OK, everyone. Forget Tesla. It’s time to start obsessing about Luis Alvarez. [That’s Luis Alvarez in the photo, standing in front of the Great Artiste. This post began, as so much in life does, with a Twitter conversation. Ben Lillie, a physicist and writer, began it; other people added to it. One of those […]
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 […]
Ann: In the last year or more or so, science writers have had Twitterfights with a culture/media writer, a nonfiction writer, and a script writer. After the latest fight another science writer, the wise and civilized Dan Vergano of USA Today, Twitter-messaged me that he wished these fights would stop because they reinforced the walls […]
Ann: May I introduce my friend and colleague, Sharon Weinberger. She once wrote a book about her trips to the world’s various nuclear test sites and it sold reasonably well, probably to boys. But recently somebody else’s book, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold History of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, […]
LWON is a group blog run semi-anarchically by 12 science writers. If you think that sounds like a recipe for chaos, just contemplate SciLance, an even more anarchic group of 35 science writers. Usually, SciLance is just a discussion group, so the chaos is relatively subdued. But last week, the writers of SciLance published their […]
Richard and Temple Grandin have co-authored a book, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, which is just out and which you should definitely and immediately buy. Before you do, Jessa and Ann have some questions. Ann: Richard, this subject is a departure for you. What is the subject, anyway? Richard: The immediate subject is the […]
In 2008, I published a book about the evolutionary origins and cultural development of warfare throughout human history. John Horgan, about as distinguished a science writer as one is likely to find, graciously invited me to share my thoughts on war’s deep past and possible futures on a web video show he hosted. It was […]