This essay originally ran on September 23, 2011. It’s reappearing here as part of LWON’s “It’s ATACAMA WEEK! (Because we can.)“ Today is the autumnal equinox, the last partial day of summer and the first partial day of autumn—at least in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern, today is the vernal equinox, the last full […]
Richard
By now you’ve probably heard about author Naomi Wolf’s fateful radio interview on the BBC. Perhaps you’ve heard the interview itself, though if not, you might want to skip it—especially if you’re a writer who traffics in facts and has ever had to cite one. It’s gruesome listening. Wolf was publicizing her book about the […]
During the descent of the most recent polar vortex, you probably heard that the Midwest was colder than Antarctica. And it was! But then the Midwest usually is, this time of year. The comparison “colder than Antarctica” makes sense on a visceral level. If the temperatures are below zero and the windchills are in the […]
Yesterday the Royal Swedish Academy announced that the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics would recognize the discovery of gravitational waves; the recipients would be Barry Barish, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, three of the visionaries who shepherded the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) through four decades of technological and bureaucratic innovations. (Another founder of the […]
On Monday the world gets another look at a total eclipse of the Sun. Viewers in the United States will be especially fortunate. See the map immediately below…and then please continue to scroll to a map showing the path of a previous solar eclipse—one that I witnessed for myself in 1999. I wrote about that […]
Welcome to Snark Week 2017! “Dirty . . . disgusting . . . filthy . . . lice-ridden boids. You used to be able to sit out on the stoop like a person. Not anymore! No, sir! Boids!” The dialogue comes from the Mel Brooks movie The Producers. The super of a walk-up is […]
The internist I’ve been seeing my entire adult life recently retired. This essay, which originally appeared here in 2014, was not about her. But it did concern the sometimes—maybe always—precarious relationship between medical professional and medical naïf, one that I will now need to renegotiate with a new internist while bearing, believe me, this experience in […]
Ann: It’s been a fairly dreadful year, personally and nationally, and giving thanks is going to be a stretch. But even when I was a kid, I was thankless. When my grandfather said grace at Sunday dinners — “Bless, oh Lord, this food to our use and us to thy service” — I thought the […]