Almost exactly a year ago, as I drove across one of the bridges that span the Tennessee River near my home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a bumper sticker “Proud of everything a liberal hates” flashed before me on the back of a white pickup truck. My stomach clenched. Even now, every time I think about that […]
Science Culture
This post was originally published on March 5, 2013 at Double X Science, a now defunct website about women in science. Since then, it’s gotten quite a bit of attention, including a story in the Columbia Journalism Review, a mention in the New York Times, and even its own Wikipedia page. The Finkbeiner Test also has […]
Last week, I saw a lot of shocked men. They were shocked about the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment allegations. They were shocked that fellow liberal men in journalism were colluding with Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos to trash women. They were shocked that there was yet another case of sexual harassment and abuse in science. You know […]
Apparently we’re feminine/ist this week, or so far Emma and I are. I want to argue about the Finkbeiner Test. The test began with a heroic vow: I would write a profile of a woman scientist without the clichés that litter these profiles. The test took off when Christie wrote a post about my post […]
I started crying while doing the dishes last week. Domestic weeping of this kind used to be rarer for me before the Trump election, but I am afraid it is all too common now since, like everyone else, I listen to the news while I do housework. In this case, for once, it was happy […]
You may have heard that there’s a total solar eclipse happening on Monday. I have known about this event for at least five or six years, which is how long my dad has been planning for it. Dad already had me pretty excited for the eclipse, but after reading David Baron’s delightful book, American Eclipse, […]
The night before I wrote this, I couldn’t sleep. There was a halfmoon beaming into my face through the windows, thrown open to diffuse the 90-degree heat that had collected like smoke in the eaves of my bedroom. There was my restlessness from poring through notes for a feature that I was trying and failing […]
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 […]