Science writer J.R. Minkel recently asked journalists “how you handle the pressures of the job and what motivates you to get up in the morning.” Below is my response, originally posted in my outtakes catchment. Though I try to keep this blog separate from my work, I’m making an exception here, because the answer touches on issues that are deeply important to me. Continue reading

Some photographs from my recent trip to Vancouver Island, one of the sweller places on Earth. Full gallery here. Continue reading

Spring grasses are tall and already seeding; summer is in the breeze that blew the last blossoms off the apple trees today. I wonder at these odd iron creatures — coal tenders, perhaps? — in the wood at the edge of the field, and how many seasons they’ve seen. Continue reading

Corporate capitalism seems more complicated now than when I was twenty-two years old, thought the WTO, IMF and World Bank were evil incarnate, and didn’t want to admit that corporations could be an effective organizational form, markets a dynamic wealth-generating system, and capital guided by ethics as well as greed.

But a few industries and professions remain unambiguously villainous, and they converge in a story told in the New York Times Magazine by Ben Heller, a hedge fund executive responsible for his firm’s investments in “emerging markets.”
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In a few slender leg bones and fragments of milk-stained pottery, archaeologists recently found evidence of one of the more important developments in human history: the domestication of horses. Continue reading