In 2019, the ETC Press published Pamela McCorduck’s book, THIS COULD BE IMPORTANT. Here, I’m releasing clips of our conversation about her life as one of the early science + technology writers.
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Elizabeth Wurtzel was—and forever will be—our GenX Rock God Writer.
My favorite conversation: What books influenced you? These are the books that influenced my life as a writer.
Whenever I see Fitzgerald in the bookstore, I can’t but recall fondly how his books taught me to write.
I’d go home, open a bottle of Jameson, turn off the lights in my room, pull out the napkins, crank up Merkinball, and write until the story was done.
Tonight, an object lesson for students in the age of social media. (Actually, I’m surprised this story has remained ‘off blog’ for so long since my friends are ever-so-happy to hear it told.) In 1999, I worked as a teaching assistant for Michael Lewis while a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate […]
Professors see multi-tasking as a function of students using technology, but the call to ban technology in classrooms fails to understand the root of the problem: a lack of reading and comprehension skills.
As the nation tried to collect itself in the hours, minutes, and days after the terrorist attacks, our president rightfully spent a great deal of time and energy reassuring the public. What I didn’t believe, though, was the insistence that we could adequately monitor digital communications in order to find out if there were looming threats.
While I am happy at Ball State University, I have to give some love to my (graduate) alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. All graduate programs are not created equal. Berkeley is an elite institution training (future) award-winning journalists who can tell stories across every medium. This is not […]
I believe in science, but I spend almost no time reading the academic literature where the science of my craft (journalism) has traditionally been published. I spend even less time trying to craft research that would get published in those outlets. For most normal human beings, this is not a controversial stance. As a tenure-track […]
When I first read Black Like Me in high school, I was sick to my stomach for two reason: This was the first time I experienced a hopeless despair about humanity. I wasn’t reading history (although it was set twenty years before); I was reading the now; and It felt oddly strange that it took […]
I spent 30 minutes watching this discussion between Kerry Washington and Don Cheadle this morning, and when it ended I couldn’t believe how quickly the time had gone by. In general, I avoid listening to people analyze large conceptual ideas (gender in Hollywood) because too many people fall back on well-worn cliches and show little […]