“Look, our snowman is still there,” I said Monday morning. “Oh!” my daughter said. “It is! Mommy, will it be there for all the times?” I picked her up. “No, it won’t,” I said. “I think it will melt. Remember how we talked about snow melting?” “Oh,” my 3-year-old said. “Okay.” Her disappointment was audible. I […]
Miscellaneous
This story ran last year after an especially turbulent trip to the pediatrician. It has since appeared in a different form on the NPR Shots blog. I am a man of science. Okay, perhaps not of science, but certainly near it. I’m science adjacent. But regardless, I consider myself to be bound, in the end, by logic […]
Decision fatigue is real. Decision fatigue is the mental exhaustion and reduced willpower that comes from making many, many micro-calls every day. My modern American lifestyle, with its endless variety of choices, from a hundred kinds of yogurt at the grocery store to the more than 4,000 movies available on Netflix, breeds decision fatigue. But […]
Greetings, Folks! Here’s what’s on offer from this past week: I can’t tell you how much I love this post from Ann. It’s about a metaphor related to gravity, or, really, not-quite gravity, what she describes as “still grounded but hair stuck straight out about to lift off….” Nice! Then Rebecca takes us on a walk […]
Describing people, actual people you’ve sat across from and interviewed, can be really hard to do well. We writers keep trying, with mixed results. But it’s worth the effort. Here’s what I think: Especially in a tough science article, getting to know people—by way of a simple “tidy brown beard” (though I’d vote to use […]
In September 2000, the UN came up with eight Millenium Development Goals. Things like solving malaria and reducing infant mortality. Perhaps out of despair for the scale of these problems–but I fear out of something worse in me–I show no signs of dedicating my life to such noble goals. They’re more important than anything I’m doing, […]
Erik wonders if the nonsense words that populate the best children’s books are a good idea when your kid is already tasked with learning two languages. “Someday he’ll learn the words “muggle,” “orc,” “Ewok,” Klingon,” “melange,” and “thoughtful lawmaker,” none of which are real,” he writes, prompting many assurances in the comments that “melange” is […]
Driving home through the bottom of Colorado you can’t help hitting mountains. A jigsaw puzzle of passes lies ahead. In the winter, choose your poison, Lizard Head, Wolf Creek, or, in the middle, the dangerous one. The route we took last week put us through the middle route, a chain of two passes leading to […]
