Dear readers of Last Word on Nothing: This will be my last post for some time, as I need to buckle down and focus on a book I am writing. The book is about the tricky ethics of our relationships with nonhuman animals in a world massively influenced by human activity. I will miss writing […]
Miscellaneous
Finding a decent bedtime story to read to your kid is harder than you might think. Most childrens books are either pointless (Superman likes red! Superman likes blue!), overproduced (A book with buttons and recorded dinosaur sounds! Wait, who made these recordings?), boring (Pokey the Bear showed Susie she had the strength the whole time!), […]
Update: this movie, Particle Fever, ended up winning a ton of awards, being shown at a ton of film festivals including Telluride, being reviewed in a ton of surprised and delighted publications including the New York Times, and generally ending up exactly the way you’d want it to. This post ran October 18, 2012, before […]
At 4 am, driving west from Ashland, Wisconsin, I flicked on BBC news and heard a report out of the North Fork of the Gunnison, a place I lived for a couple decades in western Colorado. It was about oil and gas development and the unprecedented rollback of environmental protections. Voices I know from home […]
I love the prickly, dry ecology of the northern California foothills. I love even it in late summer, when nothing is left of most plants and people but an exhausted, brittle husk. That is when my favorite plant, the California buckeye, or Aesculus californica, comes into its own. Unlike me, Aesculus californica knows when […]
This post originally ran in March 2014. Although tuberculosis cases are on the decline in the United States, we’re not headed for elimination, at least not this century. There were more than 9,000 cases in 2018, mostly among foreign-born individuals. But the news isn’t all bad: In August, the Food and Drug Administration approved a […]
This story first ran January 17, 2019. It’s about a quark. Any resemblance to the author is purely coincidental. In fact, any perceived real-world parallels reflect more on the reader’s personal issues than the writer’s, don’t you think? You know what, stop judging me. It’s been a rough couple billion years. I don’t know why, […]
