I live in a bubble. Its name is San Francisco, a magical place where everyone recycles, no one smokes, and Nancy Pelosi is considered distressingly conservative. Worse, I teach environmental sustainability at Stanford, where I’m surrounded by bicycle riding, reusable mug toting, enthusiastically composting colleagues and students. I come from the outside world, so I […]
recycling
Are scientists who work with living organisms less germ phobic than civilians? When a science-writing colleague (okay: LWON’s own Ann Finkbeiner) apologized to an infectious disease specialist for giving him an insufficiently rinsed coffee cup, he responded, “Nothing in there I’m worried about.” I once watched a microbiologist cut her bagel with a butter knife […]
Each week, I’m torn between two warring emotions as I bear a large blue box of empty wine bottles and other glass detritus into the back alley. As I set the bin out for pick-up, I feel a certain satisfaction in a civic duty well done, dispatching this jumble of glass to the recyclers. But […]