One of my favorite futurist quotes comes from a 1956 Ford commercial called Design for Dreaming. In it, the main character sings (yes, it’s a musical) the line: “Everyone says the future is strange, but I have a feeling some things won’t change.” I love this quote for a lot of reasons, and I use […]
Month: April 2016
The other night I was in the midst of writing about the Ice Age when I strayed to the internet. Up came the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography that went this year to New York Times photographers Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter for their coverage of the European refugee crises. Fresh from writing a […]
Being a new parent is a lot like trying to land an airplane with an engine on fire: barely controlled chaos in which all kinds of people are yelling different ideas in your ears. None of it is all that helpful but no one is volunteering to take the controls either. How long should you breastfeed? How […]
This is the first in a series of posts about learning a foreign language long past the age when it comes naturally. Guest Veronique Greenwood begins at the pro level, with Chinese. I slide into a desk at the back of the dim classroom, and the Thai girl in front of me turns around. What’s your […]
April 11-15, 2016 Guest poster Liza Gross details the struggles of traditional societies within the United States to hold onto their cultures in the face of ongoing settler aggression. Helen used to have a messy desk. Did it mean she was badly behaved or more creative? Now she has a clean desk. Does that mean she’s the […]
This post originally ran on November 11, 2013. I rerun it now partly because I liked it and mostly because it’s a conversation with Hope Jahren and Ben Lillie. Hope has a new book out, written with her usual brilliant, nail-gun verve; Ben runs an on-going travelling theatrical anthology that’s like nothing else I’ve heard of. […]
I wrote this post two years ago, when I worked full-time at home and my desk was super messy. Right now I am sitting at that same desk and there are four pieces of paper on it, three of which are the pages of one bill. Reasons for the change include: Marie Kondo changed my […]
I recently became familiar with a scientist whose productivity makes me exhausted: Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Count of Buffon, who produced a 36-volume work on natural history in the mid-18th century. Trained as a lawyer, he became interested in mathematics and then botany on his family’s lands in France. His work propelled him into a choice position as the […]