No, really. Stop it.

I don’t need flashy graphics, scary music and breathless reporters. I don’t need to “Find out after the commercial break!!”

I don’t want you to be the first with your breaking news and speculations.

I *really* don’t want you to interview heartbroken relatives, shell-shocked neighbors and terrified kids.

Ever.

You don’t need to make this a human interest story. You don’t need to create false suspense.

It is a human interest story already. Anyone with a heart and a mind is already interested.

You don’t need to relate it to local people. What is local in the age of the internet? When we can watch our friends tweeting from lockdown? When we can read their fear in Facebook updates and see through their eyes on Instagram?

Continue reading →

My tattoo -  “I am star stuff” in amino acids. Photo by Colin Schultz

There are many beautiful ideas in science.  We see them as beautiful because they seem to have some sort of unifying force. Or because they’re simple and elegant. Or because some talented writer put words to them that are so perfect that they ring in our heads as we go about our day to day life. But most importantly, they’re beautiful because they’re true.

The idea that strikes me as the most beautiful is one that has been said by many, many scientists, in many many ways.

As Carl Sagan said, we are all star stuff.

Continue reading →

My cat, in her Fortress of Solitude. Following the grand internet tradition of expressing emotions through cat pictures.

Social media creates an interesting paradox. It allows us to express emotion communally. To work through fear and confusion and anger and sadness with likeminded individuals, in a way that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. When I watch a tragedy unfold, I can’t help but take a step back and look at how people are relating to it, and to each other.

I don’t comment on it, most of the time. In fact, I don’t say anything at all, most of the time.

I’m sure it makes me look callous, and unfeeling. Or at the very least self-centered and oblivious.

And therein lies the paradox. Social media creates a communal place to pour our emotions. To share them, and to work through them publically.

So what about those of us who don’t do public emotion?

Those of us who, when faced with something horrible happening are just as likely to stare dumbly at the imparter of the news and mold their face into some approximation of sadness or sympathy, or whatever is the expected outward expression of our inner turmoil

I’m not saying that I don’t feel sadness for the lives lost, or anger at the person or people who did hurt others. I’m not saying I don’t sympathize with those who feel pain or fear that something else is coming.

I feel it. Intensely. Deeply. To the point of paralysis.

Continue reading →