This post originally appeared in 2012, before advances in artificial intelligence brought the possibility of deep fakes and other ways for storytelling artifacts to lie. Here I looked at the ways in which information can be false, and how we typically only look or check for certain kinds of veracity. Ever since reading the comment […]
Miscellaneous
A little over a year ago I made an unplanned trip to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. I had driven to the city to run errands but then decided to go look at art instead, a moment of pre-pandemic spontaneity that felt indulgent then, and now, I imagine, would feel like intense catharsis. It […]
Hello! It’s been a while. Thanks to the ever-lovely People of LWON for allowing me to revive this tidbit, which I wrote during the early stages of researching my book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. That book is now out—fresh this week!—and I’d love for you to give it a […]
“Is today Sunday?” my dad asks. Here we are again, having the usual phone conversation, when we go over the day of the week, the time, and whether it’s a “shower day” at the nursing home. If we talk two hours later, the same questions are bound to come up. What day is it? Do […]
Part of a series of ‘penspective’ posts using a pen for scale The earth is a producer of oddities. Crystals curl around each other like fiber optics and groundwater stains rock like Van Gogh. Geologic byproducts come out faster than Linnaeus could name off species, lava bombs, pseudomorphs, barites that look like roses, and copper […]
This post began with a question from my dear friend, the novelist and documentary filmmaker George Lerner. Looking over two years of footage from South Texas, I noticed something striking: I have lots and lots of glorious images filmed around sunset, but scant few decent shots at sunrise. Why is this, I wondered — is […]
This post originally ran in November of 2011. The universality of science – an obligation to produce identical results no matter the setting – removes a certain sense of place from science history. What does it matter where mitosis was first understood, if it could just as well be discovered anywhere in the biosphere? Furthermore, […]
