A while ago I was on a panel for the local science writing association, and each panel member was assigned to talk about writing about science in a way that’s both literary and beautiful. I gave my talk and a few days later, it was posted on the association’s website. Much social media ensued, all […]
LWON
Garwin: the Movie opens with an old, steady, precise hand on a computer keyboard, scrolling through now-declassified* documents. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower make announcements, and newspapers flash headlines about our splendid new hydrogen bomb. Then the blossom of a mushroom cloud unfolds; and John F. Kennedy talks about Russian missiles in Cuba; and the […]
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 […]
About a month ago, the science writing community found out that one of its leaders was sexually harassing his younger female colleagues. The young women, especially those looking for networks and jobs, took to the internet and named him in front of his own community. The internet got its shorts in an uproar which eventually focused on […]
I do seem to keep referring to Freeman Dyson, even writing whole posts about him. The reason, I think, is that I want to write a profile of him, even though 1) profiles of him have been done and done and done, the most recent being a full-blown biography; and 2) he’s way above my […]
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, […]
About ten years ago, doing research for a book, I asked Freeman Dyson about a study he’d helped do about whether we would have lost the war in Vietnam a little less if we’d used tactical nuclear weapons. Dyson and two colleagues, all members of a scientific advisory group called Jason, were doing this study […]