Thursday, October 18, 2007
Transit strikes and Businessweek
Content sharing is an interesting thing. It tends to yield exposure, but not necessarily more cash -- or click-throughs -- for authors. Ah, well. It's still cool to be on Businessweek's website, even for a story I did yesterday. Hey -- maybe ESPECIALLY for a story I did yesterday.
And in other written-for-Spiegel news, the French are on strike again. If organized labor keeps this kind of stuff up, the trains of the future will all resemble the Paris Metro's Line 14, which is fully automated.
And in other written-for-Spiegel news, the French are on strike again. If organized labor keeps this kind of stuff up, the trains of the future will all resemble the Paris Metro's Line 14, which is fully automated.
Labels: businessweek, paris, spiegel, strike
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Adultery!
OK, that was kind of a tease. This isn't exactly about adultery -- only sort of.
I did a short piece for Archaeology's latest issue about a page of parchment German researchers found in Sudan during excavations this summer.
About 1,000 years old, it is a homily on the evils of adultery. Still exciting, when you think about a piece of parchment lasting for ten centuries in the ruins of a Nubian church.
I did a short piece for Archaeology's latest issue about a page of parchment German researchers found in Sudan during excavations this summer.
About 1,000 years old, it is a homily on the evils of adultery. Still exciting, when you think about a piece of parchment lasting for ten centuries in the ruins of a Nubian church.
Labels: Archaeology, Nubia, Sudan
Trabi!
Someone's trying to bring back the Trabant, East Germany's notorious plastic car. Since the effort is coming from a model car manufacturer, I'm not sure how much stock I'd place in a Trabi comeback any time soon.
Read all about it in my Spiegel ONLINE article today.
Read all about it in my Spiegel ONLINE article today.
Labels: DDR, model car, trabant
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Not a dodo
Part of the fun of my job is asking extremely intelligent people painfully dumb questions about very complex subjects. I think of it as a series of free, one-on-one tutorials from some of the world's most interesting people.
In March, I flew to Oxford (well, I flew to lovely Stansted, which is in the vicinity of London, then took a train to Oxford, but you get the idea) to meet Beth Shapiro (above, photo courtesy Smithsonian). Shapiro and I both graduated from college in 1998. She went on to earn a Rhodes Scholarship and run the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre.
In addition to managing a crew of graduate students and publishing cutting-edge work on ancient DNA, she found the time to give me a free, one-on-one tutorial on the arcane art of reconstituted dodo genes, the likelihood we'll ever clone a mammoth, and the moral complications of bringing extinct species back to life. She also treated me to lunch at Balliol College, which was founded in 1263. And I got to hold the only unfossilized dodo remains known to exist. That part made me sort of nervous.
A fraction of what I learned fit into a profile of Shapiro in a special issue of Smithsonian, now available online.
Friday, October 05, 2007
Wajda and Katyn
Finally, something new to report. Back at Spiegel Online today, I wrote about Polish director Andrzej Wajda's latest film, "Katyn." It premieres today, and is about the repercussions of a particularly nasty incident in Polish-Soviet relations: The 1940 slaughter of more than 20,000 Polish officers in a forest near Smolensk. Covered up after the war, it's back with a vengeance as one of Poland's many grievances against the Russians.
Not coincidentally, Polish politicians were eager to put their names all over the tragedy in the run-up to parliamentary elections scheduled for Oct. 21. Wajda, and the descendants of some of the men killed, complained, and the government did an abrupt about-face.
I'm looking forward to seeing the movie. Wajda's amazing: probably Poland's greatest director, next to Kieslowski. Weird '70s music aside, his Man of Marble is a masterpiece I highly recommend to anyone interested in the communist period, or the cult of the Stakhanovite, or moving movies. And his website's got some great first-person essays, well-translated into English.
Not coincidentally, Polish politicians were eager to put their names all over the tragedy in the run-up to parliamentary elections scheduled for Oct. 21. Wajda, and the descendants of some of the men killed, complained, and the government did an abrupt about-face.
I'm looking forward to seeing the movie. Wajda's amazing: probably Poland's greatest director, next to Kieslowski. Weird '70s music aside, his Man of Marble is a masterpiece I highly recommend to anyone interested in the communist period, or the cult of the Stakhanovite, or moving movies. And his website's got some great first-person essays, well-translated into English.
