This is a prolific poster! Showing posts since April 22, 2013.
Whew! Popping back here briefly to discuss a very eventful few days.
On Sat, a SNOW BUNTING appears at Hayward Regional. 😱 The bird is stunning & super-rare in the East Bay. Many birders go to see it. It's living its best life on a white/brown plastic culvert that it maybe thinks is snow? 1/
Mountain bluebird 🪶
📷Cedar Mountain WInery (which is now closed, but remains very birdy)
I was trying to photograph this beautiful glaucous-winged gull when I got unexpectedly photobombed by a harbor seal that had caught a very large fish--presumably a salmon. 🪶
📷Ballena Bay
This is so real. I’ve reported on this over the years in many forms. Coral reef scientists. Conservationists caring for endlings. Public health workers in the pandemic. Journalists covering all the above. The people bearing witness are not okay.
The speaker shenanigans are happening because y’all laughed too hard at Britain and the lettuce last year
My XOXO talk is online. It's a v. personal look at what it was like to cover the pandemic, live through it, be broken by it, and heal from it. I talk about my approach to journalism, a 7-part code for being a public figure, why I left the Atlantic, and a lot more. xoxofest.com/2024/videos/...
I think we’ve learned an important lesson today, which is: If you ever run a media company, do not ever create a situation where your poetry editor might have cause to write a resignation letter, because it will scorch you from the face of the earth.
My immediate plan is to be offline as much as possible and double-down on my community, especially my local one. Grieve, regroup, plan, endure.
As @lizneeley.bsky.social first said to me in 2016, “There is no wall to put our back against—except each other.”
Your regular reminder that pandemics are social problems, which cannot be solved by the products of biomedical research if the social infrastructure necessary for delivering said products is in fucking tatters.
This burrowing owl I found a few hours ago has the energy that will carry you through this week. 🪶🦉
📸 Coyote Hills
United flight attendant: Would you like breakfast? Today we have French toast.
Me: OMG I would LOVE some French toast. Thank you. But wow, how do you even make that on a pla…
I’ve had a several dozen requests to write or be interviewed about the 5th anniversary of Covid and said no to all of them… except this one with @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social. Here’s our chat on the things we’ve memory-holed, and where we go from here.
www.kqed.org/forum/201010...
I just won the Royal Society Science Book Prize! 🥳 royalsociety.org/grants-schem...
My best to everyone at the award ceremony in London. Sharing a celebratory drink with you all even though it’s 11.30am here.
Mountain bluebird 🪶
He landed on the marker while I was driving, and I ground to a halt and crept forward at 1mph begging him not to move. 📷
I’ve been trying to make this point for two years but every surge like this cumulatively erodes the healthcare system. Every time, more healthcare workers hit the limit where they’ve just had *enough*
I wrote an op-ed for the NYT about what reporting on long COVID has meant to me—how I approached it, the impact it had, and how it taught me to be a better journalist.
This piece is sort of a manifesto for a journalism grounded in compassion, rigor, and care.
www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/o...
Behold the incandescent fury of… the bushtit. Tremble! Cower! Flee before his terrible works. 🪶
On the cutting room floor is the bit where the host introduced their interview series, The Interview, and I asked how long it took to come up with the name. Anyway, here’s me talking about birds and science and burnout and moving through the world. The photo’s nice! www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/m...
I urge everyone to read Unbreaking’s new page on everything the govt is doing to destroy & diminish medical research funding.
It’s the best thing I’ve read on this topic: @lizneeley.bsky.social & co have such done an incredible job.
unbreaking.org/issues/medic...
The Sick Times--a digital long-COVID newspaper--is 1 yr old today. I couldn't be prouder of what Betsy, Miles, and their team have accomplished. thesicktimes.org/2024/11/14/p...
If you have the means, pls join me in supporting their end-of-year fundraiser. the-sick-times.fundjournalism.org/donate/
Whenever I write about long-covid or ME, I get waves of emails from chronically ill folk who say they feel seen and heard.
But with this piece on fatigue (and PEM), I'm *also* hearing from healthy people saying that they finally get what their loved ones are going through.
Which feels amazing.
Two photos of the same Anna’s hummingbird, taken a fraction of a second apart. Iridescence is wild. 🪶