Email is an Untamable Beast

By: | December 9, 2015

Email

It’s not my imagination. Even gmail is telling me that my email is out of control, threatening that if I don’t dump some of my tens of thousands of emails (or pay them money) I will be “unable to send or receive emails.” That’s starting to sound appealing. I’ve caught myself fantasizing about creating an auto reply: sorry world, email no longer works for me. If it’s important, find me another way.

OutOfSpaceCropped

On November 30, I had 78,787 unread emails in my main email account. Today, that number is up to 78,929. Do the math and that works out to 142 unread emails in eight days, or just under 18 per day. Which does’t sound so bad, until you consider that this is just one of my five email accounts — the one with the best wheat to chaff ratio. Continue reading →

Shattered

By: | December 8, 2015

shutterstock_321434222
A couple of weeks ago, my 20-year-old cousin put his father’s service revolver to his head and pulled the trigger. His parents and one of his brothers were home at the time. They heard the shot and ran to his room. His mother and brother tried to stop the bleeding while his father performed CPR. Someone called 911. The ambulance came.

Miraculously, my cousin is still alive. The bullet didn’t take a fatal path, though its full effects aren’t yet known. The doctors initially said not to talk to the patient, to let his brain rest. His parents and siblings sat quietly at his bedside those first days, lulled by exhaustion and the hum, beep, and hiss of hospital monitors, allowed only to stroke his hand and pray.

Continue reading →

The Quantum Entanglement of Bad Things

By: | December 7, 2015

8744837175_d3256cd713_cMy husband had surgery and complications and is recovering slowly, entailing a lot of medical appointments and difficult information and difficult decisions and long absences from home and office.  Home and office have taken advantage of this to do bad things.  You might think this increase in badness is due to psychology or coincidence; it’s not.  It’s exactly what physics, in my radically new interpretation of it, says should happen.  But first, a representative sample:

The iron blew up — a click, a little white flash, no more heat — so I ordered a new one and did the ironing later.

The amplifier declined to turn on, sat there black and silent.  I didn’t even call the stereo guys.

I lost a dental crown to a plate of soft pasta.  I did call the dentist. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | December 5, 2015

DSCF4047

November 30 – December 4, 2015

Cassie provides a flashback for every parent, remembering the ultra-marathon that is early infancy.

Christie marks her birthdays by exercising the privilege of a healthy body and honoring those who didn’t get to live this long.

Erik is a father! His birth story involves bribing a cop and rushing through Mexico City with diving fins.

Michelle revisits a post on publishing’s gig economy and what editors can do to improve life for freelancers.

I look at the trouble with communicating scale in science journalism.

 

Photo Credit:  Meghan Dhaliwal.

Redux: Freelancing Still Sucks. Still, Long Live Freelancing.

By: | December 3, 2015

This post was a response to a column called “Freelancing Sucks,” which was published just about a year ago. Well, freelancing still sucks—and we still need freelancers.

6788587420_edab72e009_z

Last month, Fast Company senior editor Reyhan Harmanci published a column called “Freelancing Sucks.” She wrote:

Everyone knows this: the freelancers, who are forced to beg for months-late checks; the editors, who surf on an endless sea of referrals, looking for unicorn writers who turn in copy clean and on time; the readers, who get the short end of the content stick when writers are rushing to work quickly to justify their unlivable wages and editors don’t have the room to build relationships with writers more than one story at a time. It’s a broken system, based on bad economics.

To me, a freelance science journalist who works as both a writer and an editor, this is an all-too-familiar list. The publishing industry’s increasing reliance on the “gig economy” isn’t good for journalists, and it’s not good for journalism. (For war correspondents, it’s arguably life-threatening.) Harmanci is happy that digital-media organizations like Vox and BuzzFeed are bucking this trend with new staff hires, and so am I.

Staffing up is only part of the solution, though. Journalism needs freelancers, and staff editors can make freelancing a whole lot better. Here’s why they should, and how they can.

Continue reading →

What To Do In Mexico When Your Wife Is In Labor 700 Miles Away

By: | December 2, 2015

DSCF3928At 1:11 AM on Monday the 23rd, I woke up in my hotel room to the sound of my cell phone beeping softly.

It had been a rough couple days. I was in Los Cabos, Mexico waiting for a weather window to take a research vessel out to a series of islands off the coast. The whole team was ready but nature had not been cooperating. Two successive tropical storms, Rick and Sandra, had caused havoc with our departure time. For the last four days we had waffled every few hours between “wait” and “GO!”

To make matters worse, I was running out of time. My wife was pregnant with our first child and her due date was about two weeks off.  Our doctor had assured us (as best as any doctor can) that the baby was going to be either on time or late. But if we didn’t leave soon, I would be cutting it too close to get back in time.

So when I heard the phone early on my second night in Cabo, I figured it was the photographer giving an update on the storm. Instead, I saw a message from my friend Meghan back in Mexico City.

“Tranquillo. Your wife is fine and the contractions haven’t started but it is best that you wake up!” There were a bunch of other short texts attempting to wake me up. Still groggy, I scrolled down a bit to this one.

“I’m actually realizing these texts might be the first thing you see so I’m just gonna explain that Liz’s water broke and she is fine (very very relaxed) and the contractions have not started as of the sending of this message however she would like to talk to you as your son is preparing for his grand arrival.”

Continue reading →

Birthdays are Arbitrary and Awesome

By: | December 1, 2015

LightBirthdayCakeOver the past six weeks, my sister and two of my dearest friends have celebrated landmark birthdays (the kind with a zero at the end). These festivities have left me thinking about birthdays. Why do we celebrate them?

A birthday represents a lap around the sun — 365 Earth days, or 8,760 hours. But let’s be honest — this is a totally arbitrary number. If we were Martians, our year would take 687 days to unfold, which means that instead of celebrating a 40th birthday, you might wait a little bit and make a toast to your 22nd birthday instead. The recent Hollywood film, The Martian, never reveals whether the sexy botanist protagonist, Mark Watney, felt slighted by the fewer birthdays he experienced while stranded on Mars, but my guess is that he would have felt worse off if he’d kept his clock on Earth year time. Continue reading →

Motherhood: A postscript

By: | November 30, 2015

IMG_1496 (1)

Three and a half years ago, I wrote a post about my struggle to decide whether to have a child. Now I have one — a wriggling, screaming bundle of chub and cheeks. She is wonderful. She is awful. She defies description. Until four months ago, I could not have imagined how it would be, how it would feel to have a baby. So I thought I would write a letter to my 2012 self. I’d like to help her understand what she’s in for . . . at least in the first few months.

Motherhood doesn’t begin like you think it will. There isn’t any rhythmic breathing or sweating or straining. No pain or pushing. No labor at all. Instead it begins with a scalpel. A doctor obscured by a blue surgical drape mutters, “baby out,” and another says “well, hello there!” And then comes the wail, both terrifying and awesome. Suddenly you are responsible for the survival of seven pounds of fragile flesh and bone. You marvel at her helplessness. She has all the parts, but none of them work well. Except her vocal cords. At first, the nurses (bless them!) are always there. They show you how to feed her. They change the baby and bathe her. They swaddle her just so. They give you pain pills, the strong ones. Continue reading →