In late March I flew to Phoenix, spent a couple of days with my folks, and then drove their (former) car from Fountain Hills, Ariz. to Denver, Colo. The trip took 11 hours, 10 minutes, the first 822 miles of it done in 11 hours flat. This is possible if one a) stops only when the…

It's a bit embarrassing to say, but I attended my first political march just a couple of weeks back -- March for Science Denver. Brought along the girls and their good pal Laine. They were surprised that someone as open/occasionally strident about politics hadn't put feet to concrete for political purposes before. I said, no, you've…

The Estonians moved a statue; the Russians launched a new form of warfare. Now, a decade later, the man who was president of Estonia at the time proposes a new sort of alliance to counter a threat that has spread far from his Baltic state. Toomas Hendrik Ilves had been president of Estonia for all…

Marije Vogelzang's "Project Christmas Dinner" To understand what Marije Vogelzang really does — and she does a lot of things — there’s no better example than a project right here in Budapest in 2011. For her “Eat Love Budapest” exhibit, Vogelzang, the renowned Dutch “eating designer,” erected a few white-cotton cubicles, each almost entirely enclosed. The participant sat down inside…

In late 2016, Albert-Lászlo Barabási and colleagues published a paper aimed at putting empirical heft behind the anecdotal truism that physicists did their best work when they were young. They considered 2,887 of them, all the way back to 1893, analyzing “impact” papers by age of their progenitor. They found that younger physicists had more impact. But…