[UPDATE: see links below* for the titles of predatory journals] In honor of the posts of Michelle Nijhuis and Christie Aschwanden, too many posts to link to, about the detection, prevention, and treatment of bullshit. I hate being lied to. I purely hate it. I hate it with a cold, hard hate. I understand that […]
Ann
Dear Reader: the above is a sketch of an Individual Mobility System (IMS) proposed by a very special agency in the Department of Defense. The sketch was unearthed by my friend and much-admired colleague, Sharon Weinberger, who generously shared it on Twitter. You could call this an IMS. Or you could call it a jet […]
Writing about people who are a normal mixture of good and bad is already hard. Writing about good people is close to impossible. I wrote a profile once about a doctor who was just plain good. He wasn’t a do-gooder – “I’m not a missionary,” he’d say; he was just a man who needed to […]
I’ve known Mike Lemonick for several thousand years, ever since he assigned me to write a news story. And I was then, as I still am, congenitally unable to write news stories. All I remember is that I blew the news story and Mike had to completely rewrite it. I don’t remember the story, I […]
That’s a screen shot of the Capital Weather Gang’s excited tweet. I’d just finished explaining to our own Erik Vance what a derecho was — he said it meant “straight ahead” and was a dumb name for a weather phenomenon — and that the mid-Atlantic, which he was then visiting, wouldn’t be getting the derecho […]
A couple of Harvard astronomers just wrote an essay in a new journal called Nature Astronomy. That’s not the most riveting opening sentence you’ve ever read; I apologize. But the essay was odd, a kind of rumination-with-examples about how things in astronomy on vastly different scales nevertheless have similar structures. That is, electrons orbit atomic […]
I wish I could remember – but I can’t – the woman who told me a story about how she and other women in her profession had regular lunches, casually, unofficially, no agenda. Was she a lawyer? A writer? An astronomer? Just don’t remember. The thing I’m sure about is that the point was not […]
If you know a non-English European language, you probably know that “history” and “story” are often the same word. I don’t know how this happened but it seems deeply wrong. I was outraged. At the least, it seems to undermine the authority and credibility that history claims, as opposed to the making-shit-up that stories do. […]