As a journalist, I tend to be wary of people trying to assign me stories if they’re not an editor, and sometimes even then. Public relations types try to do it all the time. They send press releases with pre-packaged quotations for the deadline-driven writer or call up with some brilliant story idea […]
Jessa
In our centuries-old tradition of interviewing the Persons of LWON who are authors of newly-published books, here is our interview with Jessa about her new book, The Siesta and the Midnight Sun. Q: Your book is about, as you say, “the body clock as a biological universal, a foundation on which cultures lay their own rituals […]
After more than five years in the Canadian North, I’m preparing a move south to Toronto, before the next winter descends. Writing about science up here has been the best gig of my career – there’s just so much science here and so few science journalists. In my research in this part of the world, […]
There’s a long-standing affirmative action program in Canada’s North that prescribes the preferential hiring of local residents – that is, people who have lived more than half of their lives in the North, regardless of ethnicity. It’s long been a puzzle to me, as an ex-pat Southerner who still considers herself a citizen. Surely the […]
The college year in Japan starts in October, so in the fall of 1999 I had an extra month of summer vacation. It was going to be tough committing to a year in such a different place, while navigating a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend in Toronto, but life is for adventure. I arrived at […]
I’ve been back for a week, now, from TEDGlobal: an ideas conference that is fast becoming my annual clarity retreat. Moved from its original host city of Oxford, the event was held in Edinburgh, Scotland and my arrival – to paraphrase John Denver – felt like coming home to a place I’d never been before. […]
Whenever one paradigm gives way to another in science, the transition is traumatic. Hard-earned knowledge from the earlier perspective cannot be meaningfully compared with new research in the next paradigm, because even the language of the new scientific generation is slightly different. Information is lost or devalued. Such is the price of progress. The coming […]
As part of LWON’s first birthday celebrations, Ginny set a question for me: Your upcoming book is about experiencing time in different cultures. I can’t wait to read it. In the meantime, could you tell us which country/city/village, in your opinion, has the best conception of time? (However you’d like to define best.) In other […]