The first was a gerbil named Herbie. I was about ten years old. He came with another male gerbil, who turned out not to be male; many more gerbils followed. They had names, too, but Herbie is the only one that survives in memory. Some of their great-grandchildren escaped into a hospital office building; I like to think they established a permanent colony. Mice aren’t gerbils, I know, but really. Close enough. Herbie I considered a friend. I cried when he died, and dug him a grave with a headstone. Continue reading

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

For the last several months I’ve had on my tongue’s tip a quote about the importance of preserving mystery, and the poverty of its absence. To wit: on a summer evening, when swallows pluck insects from a pond’s surface, their downwards trajectories display minimalist exactitudes that might have been calculated by a missile interception system. As they rise, however, they put on shows of aerial whimsy, tumbling and cavorting in mid-air like kids in a pickup game of hockey. Continue reading

I had one of those odd I-live-in-NYC experiences today, when after covering a press conference at the Explorer’s Club I spent the day working from their board room, accompanied by, among other things, a stuffed emperor penguin and the mounted tusks of an elephant shot by Theodore Roosevelt. (A friend once gave me a tour of the Museum of Natural History’s back scenes; on the roof is a rusty iron room containing the floor-to-ceiling remains of Roosevelt’s hunts.)
Continue reading

If I think too hard about it, I become very frustrated with the inability of science, especially neuroscience, to explain my inner life — my feelings, thoughts, moods; in short, my life — in any meaningful way. Continue reading