Achenblog

Asteroid redirect mission: impossible?

Joel Achenbach — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:12:25 GMT

Here’s my story, posted at midnight last night, about NASA’s new Grand Challenge, which is to find all the dangerous asteroids out there and figure out what to do about them. Basically the government wants help in finding near-Earth … Continue reading →

The truth about the smarter kids

Joel Achenbach — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:15:12 GMT

We had a big weekend — a graduation, a milestone birthday, lots of festivities. Plus there was Father’s Day, a great American ritual in which, every year, families gather together in front of the television set to watch Phil come … Continue reading →

Hillary on Twitter

Joel Achenbach — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:00:32 GMT

Who can blame Hillary Clinton for tweeting only once so far in her new existence as a tweeter? Check out @HillaryClinton and you’ll find exactly one tweet. But obviously she needs to be careful: What with the national security state … Continue reading →

Carbon and more carbon

Joel Achenbach — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:59:52 GMT

[A quick note before I dash off for marathon interviews.] Flew in Friday night late to Los Angeles, and as always I found the view from the plane to be awesome and vaguely terrifying. It’s such a sprawling metropolis. A … Continue reading →

Washington Post paywall: Go for it

Joel Achenbach — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:36:53 GMT

Here are a few thoughts on the paywall, offered with the proviso that I speak only for the Achencubicle and this is all way above my pay grade. The paywall is the right move. It does make me a little … Continue reading →

Miles to go before I sleep

Joel Achenbach — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:46:12 GMT

Increasingly I suspect I’ll never go to China. Or Alaska. Or any number of places that I always assumed I’d visit. But I know I’m going to Houston at the end of the week. Why not China or Alaska or … Continue reading →

Goin’ Back to Old Nassau

Joel Achenbach — Fri, 31 May 2013 12:00:26 GMT

Poolside at a motel on Route 1 in New Jersey — livin’ the dream! There are cigarette butts in the wet grass under the table here, because the smokers know how to live, enjoying the outdoors while everyone else stares … Continue reading →

My advice for the graduates

Joel Achenbach — Tue, 28 May 2013 17:28:58 GMT

Yesterday we went to the Oberlin commencement exercises on the flat, glaciated landscape of northeastern Ohio, with the air unseasonably cold, giving way to a pelting rain that I feared would turn to hail. Pride sufficed as a source of … Continue reading →

“Natitude” so far is a lot of Notitude

Joel Achenbach — Fri, 24 May 2013 19:34:38 GMT

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

Joel Achenbach — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:39:40 GMT

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

Joel Achenbach — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:41:39 GMT

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 reading →

Remembering Watergate

Joel Achenbach — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:40:46 GMT

[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

Joel Achenbach — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:02:50 GMT

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

Joel Achenbach — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:13:58 GMT

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

Joel Achenbach — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:35:34 GMT

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

Joel Achenbach — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:36:17 GMT

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 Foust’s space politics blog), and here’s one takeaway: Real spaceflight is very different from PowerPoint … Continue reading →

Our future in space?

Joel Achenbach — Mon, 06 May 2013 13:31:40 GMT

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!

Joel Achenbach — Thu, 02 May 2013 11:53:40 GMT

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

Joel Achenbach — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:11:19 GMT

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 reading →

The writing life

Joel Achenbach — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:29:17 GMT

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

Joel Achenbach — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:31:11 GMT

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

Joel Achenbach — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:33:33 GMT

[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

Joel Achenbach — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:44:47 GMT

I’m still following Boston events closely, but 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 is easily reproduced … Continue reading →

Boston terror attack: Why the terrorists won’t win

Joel Achenbach — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:00:14 GMT

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”

Joel Achenbach — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:53:05 GMT

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 reading →