Last Sunday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours at a right-wing “free speech” rally in downtown Portland, Oregon. I described parts of the experience in a story I wrote earlier this week, but I’m still thinking about what I heard and saw. The rally, organized by an area group called Patriot Prayer, was held in […]
Political
Back when I was training to become a scientist in the early 2000s, I also became an activist. First it was environmental issues, then labor and anti-war campaigns. It took some guts to step on a soapbox, and more to make a sign and maybe a noisemaker (like an aluminum can taped up with pebbles […]
Dear Reader: the above is a sketch of an Individual Mobility System (IMS) proposed by a very special agency in the Department of Defense. The sketch was unearthed by my friend and much-admired colleague, Sharon Weinberger, who generously shared it on Twitter. You could call this an IMS. Or you could call it a jet […]
I can’t help but notice that placebos have crept into the political news in recent weeks. Okay, maybe they aren’t in the headlines but they’re there, just below the surface. That’s because when you see a headline about the Food and Drug Administration, you should immediately start thinking of placebos. The Trump administration hasn’t named […]
We were great in the Ice Age. Big weapons, big animals, big land. While parts of the world were crawling with hominids for a million years or more, this side of the planet was off limits. Getting here was never easy, not in the late Pleistocene, not now. The Americas are bookended by the world’s two […]
I wish I could remember – but I can’t – the woman who told me a story about how she and other women in her profession had regular lunches, casually, unofficially, no agenda. Was she a lawyer? A writer? An astronomer? Just don’t remember. The thing I’m sure about is that the point was not […]
Last Wednesday, December 21, Sidney Drell died. I can’t imagine anyone called him anything except “Sid.” He was 90. He was a particle physicist who for a while was deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator. He had a persistent South Jersey accent which somehow seemed to go with his attitude that nothing was too […]