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 [...]

Trivial Pursuit

In communicating, we make decisions — judgment calls about the listener’s own knowledge. It’s something we develop in childhood, the “theory of mind” that allows for imagining the world from another’s point of view and subsequently for meeting people where they’re at. Nevertheless, in covering specialist topics, it can be tough to know what the [...]

A Reason to Stay

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 [...]

Non-lethal but perplexing sin: Trust

New Year’s being a time for getting on top of all the administrative crap cluttering my carry-over to-do list, I’m getting my papers in order. Yesterday’s hoop-jumping mission was my Canadian passport application. It’s a really straightforward process – I fish out my recently-unearthed citizenship card, featuring a blobby baby photo of myself propped up [...]

Still Just a Rat in a Cage

    As a journalist, I tend to be wary of people trying to assign me stories if they’re not an editor, and sometimes even then. Public relations types try to do it all the time. They send press releases with pre-packaged quotations for the deadline-driven writer or call up with some brilliant story idea [...]

On Culture and Biological Clocks

In our centuries-old tradition of interviewing the Persons of LWON who are authors of newly-published books, here is our interview with Jessa about her new book, The Siesta and the Midnight Sun. Q:  Your book is about, as you say, “the body clock as a biological universal, a foundation on which cultures lay their own rituals [...]

Science vs. Tradition

After more than five years in the Canadian North, I’m preparing a move south to Toronto, before the next winter descends. Writing about science up here has been the best gig of my career – there’s just so much science here and so few science journalists. In my research in this part of the world, [...]

Plain Unfair

There’s a long-standing affirmative action program in Canada’s North that prescribes the preferential hiring of local residents – that is, people who have lived more than half of their lives in the North, regardless of ethnicity. It’s long been a puzzle to me, as an ex-pat Southerner who still considers herself a citizen. Surely the [...]

Dose Response

The college year in Japan starts in October, so in the fall of 1999 I had an extra month of summer vacation. It was going to be tough committing to a year in such a different place, while navigating a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend in Toronto, but life is for adventure. I arrived at [...]

TEDGlobal

I’ve been back for a week, now, from TEDGlobal: an ideas conference that is fast becoming my annual clarity retreat. Moved from its original host city of Oxford, the event was held in Edinburgh, Scotland and my arrival – to paraphrase John Denver – felt like coming home to a place I’d never been before. [...]