LWOVE

Love is the opposite of the snowclone; unlike the apocryphal 200 words available to Eskimos to describe falling cold white stuff, the English language outrageously, improbably offers only a single option to encompass how we feel about pizza and our only child. And if language is the scaffolding against which we form our entire construct [...]

The real scandal: science denialism at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®

Is breast cancer threatening your life? This Susan G. Komen for the Cure® ad leaves no doubt about who’s to blame —you are.

Life without beer: part 2 of my beer & running science experiment

  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 [...]

What beer and running taught me about science (part 1 of 2)

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.

When is it time to revise our story?

Today’s post began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote: At what point does a “drought” become an “arid climate?” Paolo posed his question months ago, and at first glance, it seemed like nothing more than a jab at Texan politicians like Rick Perry, who deny climate change even [...]

Seeing What We Want to See

Over the weekend, I listened to the latest episode of This American Life.  The segment was titled, “Where Your Crap Comes From” or “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The entire show was devoted to an adaptation of Mike Daisey’s monologue, the Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Daisey is a self-professed technophile and [...]

The seven deadly sins: Lust

  Yes, lust made the seven deadly sins list, but it’s also the reason we’re all here. Nearly half of all pregnancies in America are unplanned. Eliminate the primal urge to get naked and share body fluids, and homo sapiens would die out rather quickly. My admittedly incomplete internet search (it’s easy to get sidetracked [...]

Let’s stop pretending we give a damn about climate change.

As I write this, 15,000 delegates from around the globe have congregated in Durban, South Africa to take part in a magisterial game of pretend. Officially called the 17th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this recurring charade provides an opportunity for scientists [...]

How many victims are there?

The case against accused child molester Jerry Sandusky includes testimony about eight victims, and the New York Times is reporting that ten more have stepped forward since the case became public. These allegations present a pattern of abuse that extends over more than a decade, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has said he expects more [...]

Do readers grasp nuance?

When my editor at Slate asked me to look into the link between statins and violent behavior, I thought the idea was crazy. But as I dug into the issue, I decided that there was an important story there. I’m still not entirely convinced that statins cause aggressive or violent behavior in some small subset [...]