I woke up this morning, had a cup of English Breakfast tea, and thought to myself, “This seems like a good point in my career to alienate all of my readers.” So I sat down and wrote a blog post about abortion. If you are even a mildly thoughtful person, it’s a good chance you’re […]
Political
This subject is dear to me at the moment: I’ve been working forever on a short, cheap news story on the National Security Agency. One thing I’m learning — or I think I’m learning, with this stuff you can’t be sure — is more or less what AG is saying, that an internet without back doors […]
As a science writer, I trade in metaphors. It’s not just how many dump trucks to fill the Grand Canyon or how close whale intestines would get to the moon if stretched out – that’s amateur hour. No, professional metaphors are the ones you barely notice, they are so woven into the text. Better yet, […]
Today, in light of gay pride month and all the gay marriage business all over the news, I thought it might be time we at LWON weigh in on this most hot-button of issues. We look to biology to explain so much about how we interact and why we act how we do. But what does it have […]
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 […]
One recent Thursday morning, I logged into my email and made an alarming discovery. Instead of opening my inbox, Google directed me to a notice: Account has been disabled . . . . In most cases, accounts are disabled if we believe you have violated either the Google Terms of Service, product-specific Terms of Service . […]
Imagine for a second that the country of Mexico was a long funnel, with the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts as the sides of the funnel. And imagine you were to roll a marble down the Pacific side, all the way from San Diego, down Sonora, passed Mazatlan, Jalisco (though it takes a little hop over […]
Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 2 million Cambodians — 20 percent of the country’s population at the time — died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime. Some 17,000 victims were held in the regime’s most notorious prison, a former high school known as Tuol Sleng (“Hill of the Poisonous Trees”) or S-21. […]
