Bookwork and some other issues have limited my blogging lately, and I thank my followers for patience on this front.
Yet if I can’t relay all I’m thinking and reading about this and that, I can try to relay more of what I’m reading. Here, in at last a temporary revival of my sporadic “Aglitter in the Net” gatherings, are some goodies, with an (attempted) emphasis on stuff you may not have come across:
When the Tsarnaevs led the Boston cops, the FBI, and generally half the SWAT teams of the eastern U.S. on a wild-goose chase last Thursday, the first carload of journalists chasing them happened to contain two journalists I know: One was the veteran and excellent science journalist Seth Mnookin, who wrote about the adventure in The New Yorker. The other was a journalism student just shy of graduation — young, hungry, a bit skeered, given the situation, but a kid who lives for this stuff, a kid who had already jumped at the chance to cover the bombing, who has transferred an earlier yen for fast driving into a yen for good journalism — who happened to be my son, Taylor Dobbs, who about the crazy night in Hunting the Manhunt, published by Medium, a new venue former Wired.com EIC Evan Hansen. (Note to editors everywhere: Kid graduates in June. Currently up for grabs. He did this with a cell phone, no salary, and no press pass. Imagine what he could do with backing. Just an observation.)
A separate Storify recreates much of Seth & Taylor’s real-time effort to sift coherence from chaos.
Burkhard Bilger: A New Era in Mars Exploration : The New Yorker – Bilger has a knack for making almost any subject he writes about seem a perfect match for him. So it is here. Dig in.
You know how Boston was locked down as cops and journalists chased the bombers? One-night stands weren’t exempted. From Esquire.
How do you piss off Harrison Ford? Ask him about Star Wars.
The incredible Neuroskeptic wrestles with a study casting yet more caveats on the fMRI brain scans the press so loves.
It looks as if primates may shape forest structure in Africa.
Now and then, as people die, they see life with particular clarity and relay it with especial beauty. Lisa Adams does so here.
George Johnson writes about The Best Science Book Ever Written. It’s certainly one of the top ten.
Does real-time reporting on Twitter and such make for good news? Jury’s out. But Matthew Ingram is right in saying Twitter shows how the news is made, and it’s not pretty — but it’s better that we see it.
What’s it like having a stroke? Let Andy Revkin tell you. Don’t listen to it while you’re taking a run.
And to end a round-up from a sad week, Why do humans cry? A new reading of the old sob story.
Photo: The author
