Albert Einstein once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
That’s the essence of a good science writer: make it simple for readers to understand but not too simple that you’re misconstruing the facts. When I started out, some 30-plus years ago, I had just graduated from medical school and thought that all I needed to do was translate medical jargon. “Myocardial infarction” became “heart attack.” “Edema” became “fluid retention” or just plain bloating.
But I quickly learned that the job was more than serving as an interpreter. Medicine is an uncertain science.
In early January, a guest stayed in room 812 at the Hotel Alex Johnson, in Rapid City, S.D. As the anonymous visitor wrote in the guest book the next morning, the night was a bit more than uneventful.
“The Hilton app does not warn you about ghosts when you select a room,” the guest wrote. “A couple of co-workers told me I was nuts for staying there, but I don’t believe in ghosts, so I figured that made me immune to them.”
After a line space: “I could not have been more wrong.”
“Hold your nose,” instructs Cat Black. On her cue we spoon some melted chocolate into our mouths and taste without smelling, quietly considering what’s happening in our mouths. Contrary to the deliciousness my brain is anticipating, it’s an anticlimax: I can detect a slick of chocolate across my tongue and some vague sweetness, but almost no flavor.
After a few moments, Cat signals to let go of our noses. Whoosh! As the aroma molecules waft from my mouth to the back of my nose, they fire the nerve signals that tell my brain about the different compounds in the chocolate. Suddenly there’s a flood of flavors: rich chocolate, a little bitterness, some bursts of fruitiness. And just when I think the flavors are fading, I detect a wave of something else. Is it coffee? “You can see that a lot of the subtlety of the flavor of chocolate is in the aroma,” Cat says. By some estimates, only 10 to 20 percent of what we perceive as flavor comes from our taste buds—the rest is delivered through our nose.
Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. Surely, I will cancel this trip, I thought, as I shopped for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee. Surely, a person who calls off a wedding is meant to be sitting sadly at home, reflecting on the enormity of what has transpired and not doing whatever it is I am about to be doing that requires a pair of plastic clogs with drainage holes. Surely, I thought, as I tried on a very large and floppy hat featuring a pull cord that fastened beneath my chin, it would be wrong to even be wearing a hat that looks like this when something in my life has gone so terribly wrong.
Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York house with two willow trees I had bought with my fiancé.
Ten days later and I didn’t want to do anything I was supposed to do.
Part psychological thriller, part murder mystery, Daniela Petrova’s ambitious and exhilarating debut novel, Her Daughter’s Mother, grapples with what it means to become a parent in a world with ever-expanding options for growing a family — from fertility treatments to egg donation to surrogacy to adoption. Petrova’s timely new book is a deep dive into the oft-underrepresented world of infertility, pregnancy, and motherhood, including all the medical, legal, and emotional obstacles women face. In this rich narrative territory, Petrova plays on the possibilities of what could go wrong even when all goes according to plan.
It's pretty rare for a writer to produce a novel that wins the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and, then, a scant three years later, bring out another novel that's even more extraordinary. But, that's what Colson Whitehead has done in following up his 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, with The Nickel Boys. It's a masterpiece squared, rooted in history and American mythology and, yet, painfully topical in its visions of justice and mercy erratically denied.
Among my fellow punctuation nerds, I have a reputation as someone who has no use for semicolons. I don’t hate semicolons; I hate writing about semicolons. Fortunately, now I don’t have to, because Cecelia Watson, a self-identified “punctuation theorist” who teaches at Bard College, has written a whole book about them: “Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.”
A thrush crashed into my window:
one lovely voice the less
killed by glass as mirror—