Have you ever wanted to take a vacation from your own head? You could do it easily enough with liberal applications of alcohol, weed or hallucinogens, but that’s not the kind of vacation I’m talking about. What if you could take a very specific vacation only from the stuff that makes it painful to be […]
Miscellaneous
Is breast cancer threatening your life? This Susan G. Komen for the Cure® ad leaves no doubt about who’s to blame —you are.
The question came to me at 10-something AM in the morning. I had just hurdled a flaming fire pit, the finish line of a stupidly steep trail run in the desolate cliffs of Western Colorado. Now I was drinking a can of cold beer I’d pulled from the race refreshment cooler. And damn, if […]
Our runners. (click on photos to watch them drink beer.) I love to run. I also love to drink beer. Sometimes I run, then drink beer. My friends and I do this pretty regularly, and at some point I began to wonder if it was as harmless as we thought.
Science education amounts to a Great Winnowing — from millions of school kids fascinated by science down to orders of magnitude fewer actually making a living, or a life, doing it decades later. Whatever the reasons so many flee or are pushed out of science — and there are many, both personal and institutional — […]
There’s nothing like a stagnating job search to make you question your calling in life. I’ve been staring at the title “science journalist” for a couple of months now, and every time the words look more alien to me. The fact is, though I have a passionate interest in making science accessible to the public […]
Last year, I wrote a story for Smithsonian about white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease that’s killing cave-dwelling bats in the eastern United States. Researchers told me about watching sick, confused bats flutter out of caves in the middle of winter; about entering caves literally carpeted with bat carcasses; about picking bat bones, as slender as […]
I live in a bubble. Its name is San Francisco, a magical place where everyone recycles, no one smokes, and Nancy Pelosi is considered distressingly conservative. Worse, I teach environmental sustainability at Stanford, where I’m surrounded by bicycle riding, reusable mug toting, enthusiastically composting colleagues and students. I come from the outside world, so I […]
