What can you say about a fifty-seven-year-old book that has outlived its usefulness? That it was beautiful. And brilliant. And taking up valuable space in my personal library. Our household has six 84-inch bookshelves lining two living room walls, and four more in the bedroom. All of the living room bookshelves and two of the […]
On Writing
I swear, I am not going to write exclusively about Mexico City. Really, I’m a science writer, not a travel writer. I swear it. But after my initial post, Christie sent me the book, Several Ways to Die in Mexico City, by Kurt Hollander and I just had to read it. At first, I was actually […]
I have an assignment from a magazine to write a profile of a woman astronomer. I am delighted about this: the magazine is excellent, the editors are superb, and the woman astronomer is impressive. I did notice that the assignment came just before the magazine announced publicly it needs to redress its problem with a […]
Last summer, I spent nearly a whole day sitting by the river in my hometown with an old friend from grade school. For most of it, we didn’t talk. It was not an easy task for me at first. Although I like quiet, the river I usually swim in is made of words: writing, talking, […]
For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are writing about our most daunting science-related subjects and why they scare us. The advice came to me within the first few months of starting as a science writer: always be on the lookout for good math stories, […]
For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are choosing our own most daunting science-related subjects and writing about why they scare us. My father wasn’t a physicist, but he could work wonders with gravity. He’d be showing me how to change a flat, or fix […]
“Well, you know we only use about 10 per cent of our brain.” I don’t like when people tell me this. Someday, I hope to acquire the guts to issue the following rejoinder: “Which 10 per cent do you use?” But because I don’t like confrontation, I usually just make a face of mute disappointment […]
For the holiday season, we here at LWON discussed a series of Secret Santa posts: we would assign one another posts about our own areas of specialization so, say, archeology might be assigned to an eco-writer. Fear erupted. What if I get biology? What if I get physics? Count me out! Then we realized: we could confront […]