Pets, Prisoners, and Personhood

I never imagined that writing a book about cats and dogs would land me in the Boulder County Jail. But there I was on a Friday afternoon in late September, surrounded by 15 inmates in the middle of Cell Block B—and looking for the exit. At that moment, I was more cold than afraid. The […]

The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride

On June 26, 2000, three famous men — one president, two scientists — made a big announcement at the White House. Two independent teams — one public, one private — had published a first draft of the human genome, or as one of the scientists called it, the “book of life.” It was a feat. […]

Guest Post: Not So Fast

The news of a detection of faster-than-light speed neutrinos by the OPERA experiment stunned the physics and astronomy community last week.  I read the paper, and I listened to the talk from Geneva over the Web. This is seriously weird stuff! Faster-than-light speed neutrinos!? The talk was filled with wonderfully arcane geodetic methods for measuring […]

Hilda and Thomas

Bear with me, I want to talk about my grandparents. Hilda was my mother’s mother.  Thomas was my father’s father.  The difference between my mother’s and my father’s families was enormous. My mother’s family was large and blue-collar — farmers, mechanics, truckers – and not much money or education; not much use for the fine […]

Dear Mom

My mother is spunky and smart and I love her very much. But she’s got this one trait that drives me crazy: she believes everything she sees on The History Channel. I visited her in Michigan a few weeks ago. One night at a local brewery, with my sister, Charlotte, and her boyfriend, Greg, in […]

The Calligraphers and the Apple

uring my first year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, I wrote a lot of term papers and played a lot of Tetris on Mac Classics. Squat, sturdy, and pallid, with a postcard-sized monochrome screen, the Classic was three times as heavy as the aluminum-bound MacBook I write on today — with a mere 1/2000 […]

Guest Post: Microscope, DIY, 3 Minutes

The University of Victoria conservation field class is rapt. A blowtorch has just been ignited, oomph, and Patrick Keeling, champion of eukaryotes and microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, feeds a straw-thin glass capillary pipette through the hot blue flame. He removes the pipette from the flame and stretches it apart into spun hair. […]