Redux: H.G. Wells’s Advice on Science Writing

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 […]

The Wonderful World of Oz…and Science

Lately I’ve been reading my way through the series of Oz books. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is only the first in a series of 14 books, and it’s not remotely the best. It’s fascinating to reread books I loved as a child. Some are still great. Others have inexplicably morphed into poorly-written, preachy duds. […]

A drop of treasure, lost in an ocean of debt

Let’s get this out of the way first: Ancient Alexandria, it’s not. Still, the library of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego, is the closest thing the marine sciences have to a central repository of books, periodicals and documents. And like that original Alexandria, this one is threatened by, […]