Last year, I wrote a story for Smithsonian about white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease that’s killing cave-dwelling bats in the eastern United States. Researchers told me about watching sick, confused bats flutter out of caves in the middle of winter; about entering caves literally carpeted with bat carcasses; about picking bat bones, as slender as […]
Mind/Brain
This is how it happens for me: I’m completely asleep, and then something terrible creeps across the room, reaches spindly, pincer-like fingers for my hand, and pinches. That pinch is what wakes me up in terror, gasping and whimpering and trying desperately to pull my arm under the covers. But I can’t. I can’t do […]
A general psycho-neuro scenario of anger: It begins outside you, with some sort of trigger – injustice, humiliation, betrayal, dishonor, frustration, negligence, restraint, physical threat. It moves inside, into the pre-human depths of your brain and lights up a bunch of neurons called the amygdala. The amygdala and some of its neural associates analyze the […]
You know the feeling: somebody has something and you want it for yourself. That thing may be talent, or success, or good looks, or something simple . . . like a bag of chips. For me, the emotion is all too familiar. See that cute girl on the subway? The one with curly blonde hair, […]
Dearest readers, we hope you had a gluttonous, slothful, greedy and lustful holiday, with only the tiniest touches of wrath. Here at the Last Word on Nothing, we’re celebrating the season with a series of posts on the Seven Deadly Sins. Beginning tomorrow, each of our crack writers will tackle his or her favorite (or […]
This past summer, I spent two weeks sitting, working and, once, sleeping next to a hospital bed, trying and failing to communicate with my father. He had called for an ambulance on the evening of July 25 because he couldn’t breathe. With end-stage emphysema, he often couldn’t breathe, but apparently that night he was frightened […]
When I’m thrashing through the brambles of a first draft, no story in sight, I have one reliable lifeline. WWJMD? What would John McPhee do to get himself out of this #%&! mess? This, after all, is the guy who found fascinating stories in citrus cultivation. And geology. And Switzerland! Some of his writing is […]
Earlier this month, I gave an Ignite talk at the National Association of Science Writers meeting. (I also organized a panel on covering scientific controversies–click here to listen to/download mp3s of my interviews with panelists Gary Taubes, Jennifer Kahn, Jeanne Lenzer and Brian Vastag.) I’ve had numerous requests to share my Ignite talk, and so […]