Publications are funny creatures. I’ve worked for quite a few, mostly magazines, and each has had its own personality, its style of groupthink. Unlike a traditionally-structured corporation, its collective identity and mandate is vague, shifting as the names change and migrate upward on the masthead. The cover above is from the first fledgling magazine I […]
Miscellaneous
Fiscal year 2012 was a record year for whistleblowers. According to the Taxpayers Against Fraud Educational Fund, the U.S. government recovered more than $9 billion through lawsuits invoking the False Claims Act, legislation that gives private citizens the right to sue those that commit fraud against government programs (and share in any fines that are eventually collected). A […]
Here’s my ideal Sunday morning: Wake up at 10 am, drink coffee, read, hit the farmer’s market, make brunch. Here’s what I did yesterday morning: Woke up at 7am, consumed a carefully calculated quantity of carbs, ran 20 miles, and plunged myself, fully clothed, into a bathtub of ice water. That’s what a lot of […]
“Bern. 1905.” This simple declaration of setting—space; time—comes about a quarter of the way into Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson currently in revival on a world tour. The brief spoken passage is one of the few, if not the only, that is unaccompanied by music. (Actually, the line […]
October 1 – October 5 Virginia attends a Story Collider, listens to a scientist who picks up roadkill armadillos to study the erectile tissues in their penises, wonders why more scientists don’t tell stories, advises them how to go forth and do so. Christie was pissed off before about the Komen Foundation’s insistence that screening […]
24 – 28 September In which Cameron informs us that gull poop carries drug resistant bacteria that infests beaches, lakes and even dumps. Delightful stories abound of the falcons and dogs that have been dispatched to chase them off. But that makes me wonder: after they’re chased off, where do they take their pestilent cargo? […]
Something surprising happened last week: I heard a new song, and I liked it. Liked it enough to want to find out who sang it, and how I could hear more. Once, that would have been utterly unremarkable. For a good part of my twenties and thirties, I was a music junkie. I went out […]
September 10 – 14 Virginia says drinking to forget doesn’t work. What does work is pot. Maybe good cooks are really, sneakily good scientists, says Cameron. Whether city living makes you itchy and cranky, Science is not sure. Cassandra is. Autumn is so lovely, says Christie, but what with global warming you might not […]
