Blog Profile / Achenblog
| URL : | http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/achenblog | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | News / Independent News | |
| Posts on Regator: | 390 | |
| Posts / Week: | 3.6 | |
| Archived Since: | April 20, 2011 | |
Blog Post Archive
“Natitude” so far is a lot of Notitude
I am pretty sure that’s a terrible headline, but it’s a Friday afternoon and we’re going with it! First, nothin’-but-readers on my colleague Jenna Johnson’s scoop on the hedge fund billionaire who said women can’t be good traders in global … Continue reading ?
How to mulch: the app we need
The other day I was putting down some mulch and I noticed that the big plastic sack it came in carried instructions. “How to mulch,” it said. There were all kinds of suggestions, if not requirements, for proper mulching, including … Continue reading ?
The self problem
Toward the end of his book “Why Does the World Exist?” Jim Holt poses a brain-boggler about the self. “If you happen to be one of a pair of identical twins, try this thought experiment. Imagine that the zygote that … Continue readin...
Remembering Watergate
[Cross-posted from The Fix.] I was 12 years old during Sam Ervin’s Watergate hearings, and watched them over the course of a long, hot summer, a time when I seemed to register the startling fact that my parents weren’t infallible … Continue reading ?
Martin Waldseemuller’s secret knowledge
Today, what’s hot in cartography! We need to talk about cartography more often here on the A-blog. Let’s just admit it: Most of us could easily spend an entire evening studying maps. And I don’t mean Rand McNally road atlases, … Continue reading ?
Why there’s something rather than nothing
In the late 1990s I made a list of the 5 biggest unanswered questions in science. All obvious stuff, like how did life originate and how does consciousness emerge from the brain. But number one, the foremost mind-boggler, the ultimate … Continue reading ?
Oh, wait, before you go back to Earth
Imagine if you’d been in space, weightless, for 5 months, and were scheduled to fly back to Earth on Monday, specifically to southern Kazakhstan (wouldn’t be my first choice but there’s no other option at the moment). But then you … Continue reading ?
Real and imaginary human spaceflight
I’ve been attending some of the sessions at the Humans to Mars summit the last couple of days (for full coverage check out Jeff Faust’s space politics blog), and here’s one takeaway: Real spaceflight is very different from Power Point … Continue reading ?
Our future in space?
Before my laptop battery dies — Houston, we have a problem — let me cross-post my story on NASA and Mars. I’m at the H2M summit at GWU where NASA boss Gen. Charles Bolden is speaking, and I’m hoping we … Continue reading ?
Can’t stop birding!
Woke with a start this morning to realize that I’d missed my May 1 birdwalk. I’m not one to let the calendar push me around — “Says who?” I snap when the kids whine that it’s “Christmas” or somesuch nonsense … Continue reading ?
Gettysburg and the Historian’s Original Sin
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was writing a Gettysburg story. Here it is. It’s hopelessly inadequate, of course — unequal to the subject matter, but still a big whack at a large topic. [I should have mentioned: … Continue readi...
The writing life
Your blogger pops up momentarily at the start of John McPhee’s new essay on writing (subscription required for the whole piece but anyone can read the lede). His piece is the latest reminding that a writer is someone for whom writing … Continue reading ?
Boston Marathon bombings: Unanswered questions
There are a lot of unanswered questions in Boston. The FBI is not providing much information. The hospital where the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is being treated won’t give his condition,citing an FBI prohibition; all media requests to the hospital … Continue reading ?
Boston bombings, etc.: A crazy, disturbing, unsettling news week
[What a week. Here's a quick-and-dirty essay typed up this morning.] Friday morning America woke up to more mayhem — a manhunt for a terrorist in suburban Boston. The whole city on lockdown. One suspect dead. Officer slain. Another officer … Continue reading ?
Sandy Island, the Island That Never Was
Still following Boston events closely, but in the meantime, just for a mental break from all that, let’s talk about Sandy Island — the island that never was, but always will be, thanks to the magic of digital information that … Continue reading ?
Boston terror attack: Why the terrorists won’t win
Americans spend a lot of time in crowds. We enjoy exercising our constitutional right to assemble freely. Nine times so far this month, baseball fans have thrust themselves onto a Green Line train, like spam in a can, heading toward … Continue reading ?
Tropic Magazine: Jeb Bush “Born to Run”
Read Gene’s Outlook piece, on Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. I make a cameo. Needless to say, I miss Tropic Magazine — the treehouse of Miami journalism in the last two decades of the last century. We believed in good … Continue readi...
Brood II cicadas: Gettin’ buggy again
[At left: My cat, Pip, checking out a camelia blossom. The flowers in my yard are blooming so quickly you can almost hear them opening up. It's explosive. Pent-up energy.] My colleague Darryl Fears reports that Brood II, another vast … Continue reading ?
Springing up a storm
As I get older I become more sensitive to, and obsessed with, the weather, and not just day to day but hour to hour. I make assiduous use of the “hourly” button at weather.com to get a sense of how … Continue reading ?
Gettysburg forever
Yesterday I tromped around the battlefield at Gettysburg, though “tromped” is a bit misleading, since anyone who goes to the battlefield does most of the exploration by car. It’s not actually a field. It’s 6,000-something acres. The town itself is … Continue reading ?