Freelancing Sucks. Long Live Freelancing.

By: | January 14, 2015

6788587420_edab72e009_zLast 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 →

Guest Post: In Praise of Snow Geese

By: | January 13, 2015

16168669335_97bfba03b4_kOn New Year’s Day, my friend Randy Roberts and I put on white hazmat suits and went out to shoot snow geese.  We were told that the birds regard a human in a white suit as one of their own and they let you walk freely among them, something hunters supposedly discovered a while back.  We had no intention of killing any snow geese, though:  Randy, an accomplished wildlife photographer, was armed with a camera, not a gun.

We caught up with a gaggle of several hundred birds blanketing a field across the road from the local high school in Lewes, Delaware. To the amusement of passing motorists, we crept up to them in our white suits, looking like inspectors at a superfund site. Just as we got close, they took off in a squawking, whirling blizzard.  Nevertheless, Randy got some great shots with the sun setting behind the rising flock.

We have since learned that we should have parked ourselves in a field with some decoys and waited patiently for the geese to come to us.  It could have been a long wait: Snow geese are wary birds, and they are consummate survivors. Their numbers, once dangerously low, have increased so dramatically in recent decades that they are now the most numerous waterfowl in North America. They migrate thousands of miles in huge flocks, communicating noisily with each other as they go. And they even have a natural feel for physics. Continue reading →

Yelping My Eye Surgeon

By: | January 12, 2015

EyeIllustration

For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamed of waking up, opening my eyes, and seeing clearly. I’ve worn glasses since age 8. Without them, I can’t see my partner’s face in the bed next to me. I can’t see the clock on the phone sitting on my nightstand, or stargaze when I’m sleeping outside. I’ve been saving up for laser correction surgery for many years, dreaming of the day where I can wake up with the world in focus.

I’m also very cautious. These are my eyes, after all. The procedure is expensive, and I want to choose the best surgeon possible. As I recently learned, that is no easy task.  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 10, 2015

Bethany and SteveJanuary 5-9, 2015

Roberta tried out the Japanese art of decluttering and offered vindication to pilers like me with news of a study finding that people who organize paperwork in piles accumulate less stuff than those neatniks who file them.

Guest poster Anne Sasso told us about her devotion to a pocket calculator so beloved that it sometimes induces magical thinking.

Washington DC had a snow day, and Helen got giddy like a kid.

Craig sets out on a paleolithic adventure, notices that the tasks involved unwittingly split along gender lines, and that gets him thinking about “the incredible shrinking prehistoric woman.” (No word on whether his group tried the “paleo” diet.)

Erik compares movie clips to footage of rock climbers falling in real life to illustrate what Hollywood gets wrong about falls.

Debunking Hollywood: Falling!!!

By: | January 9, 2015

Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes. shutterstock_96684256

Our hero is in dire trouble yet again. He stands on the rooftop, a villain in front of him, his feet inches from a seven-story fall. Sweat glistens on his brow as he fearlessly throws a punch but the villain is too quick. In a swift movement, the evil man kicks our hero in the stomach and he plummets toward the pavement below, the villain cackling with glee and twisting his mustache.

Ah! But just as his fate looks sealed, 20 feet down he catches the bottom of the fire escape and hangs precariously by one arm. Whew!

This kind of last-ditch-grab-for-safety is standard fare in almost any action movie. (The scene you’ve just read was an excerpt from my as-yet-unpublished trashy detective novel, Blades of Courage, part of the Slade McGee series. No, no, make that Icy Hot, part of the Chet Heartstrong series. I’m still ironing out the details.)

But how possible is it in reality? As a former rock climbing instructor, I’ve taken my share of falls – always with a rope firmly attached to me. Every time it happens, I’m shocked by just how fast a person can fall. Most times I don’t even know what’s happening until the rope catches me five or ten feet down. Continue reading →

Gender in the Paleolithic

By: | January 8, 2015

Bethany and SteveCamped with seven adults and five children on the south-central coast of Alaska, I was doing a little writing experiment. I had been following possible Paleolithic routes, taking off with adventurers across glaciers and mountains to get a sense of living and traveling in the same landscapes people faced tens of thousands of years ago. One thing was missing: families.

Following a hypothesized coastal migration route from 16,000 years ago, we headed out in a gaggle of sea kayaks. We’d been dropped off three hours by boat out of Whittier, Alaska, for a 9-day trip. By day 5, we were running low on food, turning to foraging, digging up clams, setting a shrimp pot, and catching whatever we could by hook and line.

As if going through a house after a nightly rampage of children and pajamas, one evening we put away toothbrushes and picked up stray, damp articles of clothing, hanging them on guy-wires from the kitchen tarp. And not like living in a house at all, we collected all food that wasn’t in hard-plastic bear boxes and packed it into bags to hang as high and as intricately as we could. We had a pulley system rigged up over the water, about a hundred pounds of food suspended from a rope thrown over a sturdy spruce hanging 30 feet above the incoming and outgoing tide. It was as far as we could get food from bears.

Gender was an issue from day one. Our tasks divided by male and female. It was never discussed. It just happened. That evening, I sat with Becky Ela, a mother of two from a farm family in Western Colorado. Becky and I sat at the edge of the kitchen tarp. I was on the dry ground and she was on a cooler whittling a stick into a rug of wood shavings. Rain fell in dusk light darkening into an early-July midnight. Tent lights went out, other parents putting kids down for the night. Continue reading →

A Snow Day

By: | January 7, 2015

snowy morningThe first snow of the year, and the first noticeable snow of this winter, fell here in D.C. on Tuesday. Yes, we know that our reaction to snow makes no sense. No, we don’t have enough snowplows. No, we don’t know how to drive in snow. You’re very clever for noticing, People Who Live In Consistently Snowy Places.

A few inches of snow wreaked the usual havoc. Screenshots of the traffic maps this morning showed red spaghetti. Schools delayed, then closed, or didn’t close and earned their very own trending hashtag (#closeFCPS). Some find the chaos profitable–“body shop weather,” an acquaintance who manages such a business called it. Many, I gather, find it annoying.

With no car to keep out of the ditch or kids to worry about, snow still holds that joy of childhood for me – the promise of a special day, just because the moisture and the cold collided in just the right way in my part of the world. Even though I don’t get days off for meteorology anymore, because I work for a company headquartered in a place that gets serious snow. But a snow day still feels special, a cold, white present from the sky, a literal gift from above. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Mars Rover of Calculators

By: | January 6, 2015

Anne Sasso's calculatorMy cell phone battery only capriciously holds a charge. My laptop battery isn’t much better. In fact, it seems that I have to replace my computer every three years because something goes kaplooey. The current one no longer emits sound. Oh, the darned CPU fan still sounds like a wheezing freight train chugging up a long, torturous incline. But I can’t hear the audio on Jimmy Fallon videos, use Google Hangout or rely on that essential noise that Outlook makes to remind me of an interview scheduled in 15 minutes.

Given my experience with electronic devices, I feel I can be forgiven for indulging in a little magical thinking related to my pocket calculator (which I’ve never actually carried in a pocket).

The pocket calculator in question? It’s a Sharp scientific calculator, model EL-5103S. It’s about the size of an iPhone 5. Today’s teenagers might even mistake it for some retro-hip version of a smartphone—until they flipped open the cover and saw the tiny screen and the vast array of buttons. Continue reading →