Achenblog

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 →

Brood II cicadas: Gettin’ buggy again

Joel Achenbach — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:40:07 GMT

[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

Joel Achenbach — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:55:19 GMT

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

Joel Achenbach — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:46:48 GMT

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 →

The plant lady and Cancerland

Joel Achenbach — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:48:51 GMT

My story in the Health/Science section about my mom, who has round two of chemo today. I took the photo, fyi, three days before round one, and two months after her surgery. She was selling plants at the spring garden … Continue reading →

Kevin Ware injury, and the beautiful game

Joel Achenbach — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:10:56 GMT

Basketball is a beautiful game, now more than ever. The players are faster and more athletic, with mind-boggling body control, demonstrating an astonishing combination of speed, power and delicacy. The game is never brutal, unless you count the spectacular throw-down … Continue reading →

My obituary (347th in a series)

Joel Achenbach — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:24:55 GMT

Fetched the paper from the front walk and plopped it on the counter, an act that registers me as a primitive being, stuck in ancient information-retrieval rituals that date to the age of glaciation and the Bering Land Bridge. Newspapers … Continue reading →

Washington Nationals: Report from spring training

Joel Achenbach — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 16:35:36 GMT

I don’t believe in jinxes, any more than I believe in ghosts, leprechauns, UFO aliens or liberal Republicans. So I’m not worried about Sports Illustrated putting the Nationals on the cover and picking them to win the World Series. This … Continue reading →

Hypercommunication: How we live now

Joel Achenbach — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:51:23 GMT

The house is dark this morning, and gazing outside I see that the trees have been painted with snow down to the last twig. The lawn should be launching itself toward the mower-blade height at this point of the year, … Continue reading →

One Herald Plaza: Notes from an Irish wake

Joel Achenbach — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:27:17 GMT

There was a time when the ownership of the presses conferred immense power and civic prestige, and the opportunity to make a great fortune, or even establish a media empire. The modern history of The Miami Herald begins with the … Continue reading →

Paywall time

Joel Achenbach — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:15:15 GMT

There’s a lot to say about paywalls and business models and the future of journalism and the deep questions of whether information really wants to be free or, as I’ve often claimed, stolen, and I can feel the powerful urge … Continue reading →