Yesterday Francis Halzen received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for overseeing the experiment that detected an extraordinarily elusive subatomic particle via an ingenious reinterpretation of the concept of “telescope.” A version of this essay about that experiment originally appeared here on November 26, 2013, following the announcement of that discovery. The news this past […]
Miscellaneous
Grief is a persistent little bugger. It never really goes away, just changes shape. Well after my last book came out without the fanfare I’d hoped for, I’m revisiting a version of grief that I hadn’t known existed, and that’s still with me. It’s no long a dart; I’d say it’s more a smattering of […]
My friend Laura provided me an instructive moment of delight yesterday when she confided that she’d just opened a jar of 2007 “Plum Yum,” a jammy concoction made of Italian prune plums from my orchard. She said she’d been trying to break her lifelong habit of saving special things for special occasions. “Trying to drink […]
Your average frog loves a good meaty fly. But to this amphibian predator, a stationary fly might not register as something worth nabbing, if it is seen at all. “[A frog] will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving,” wrote the authors of a 1959 paper in Proceedings of the IRE […]
Since writing a book on the night sky (The Wild Dark), I can’t help looking up. I’ve slept outside most nights since the end of February, more comfortable falling asleep under stars than in a bed. The other night, I woke startled at the brightness of the Millky Way, thinking it was a wildfire. The […]
I’m not getting any less mad about this, didn’t you hear me the first time? The New World, when the Old World was full of all kinds of people, had nobody. NOBODY WAS HERE. THEY ALL CAME HERE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE. Everybody here was at some point AN IMMIGRANT. And yes, I’m shouting, why can’t […]
Sometimes we change our minds about big life choices: where we live, what career we pursue, who walks beside us. I’ve been pretty consistent so far, especially when it comes to what follows. A friend of mine wants to be donated to a body farm so she can “live again” by being prodded and measured […]
So there we were, on the deck of a nice restaurant with a view of the mountains and a valley with a river flowing through it, and a menu Google had described as “elevated.” Then, out of nowhere, a tiger appeared. It prowled the deck, brandishing its claws at a bachelorette party sitting next to us. […]
