To get to Tillamook, Oregon, head west from Portland and veer left onto Oregon Route 6. The next 50 miles are a winding, sometimes steep road that takes you up and over the Coast Range, through parts of the Tillamook Burn, following the Wilson River down into a valley full of dairy farms that supply [...]

Clearly, I get blogging. For a writer, blogging seems the natural evolution of Samual Pepys’ diary. Even Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. I don’t understand the attraction of Twitter, though, except perhaps as a target of satire. 140 characters? RT? @whocares? I think not.
Historical Tweets combines witty writing with an appropriate sense of the absurd. [...]

My last day in England, I embarked upon a pilgrimage.
I took the Tube from Russell Square to Leicester Square, transferred to the Northern Line for one stop going south, and entered Trafalgar Square from Charing Cross.
Two nights earlier, I’d walked down in the dark, emerging between St. Martin-in-the-Fields and the National Gallery at dusk, [...]

Nuclear physics fascinates me. The creative potential of nuclear power intrigues me. The destructive potential of nuclear weapons repulses me.

Photo from Pierre J’s collection of French nuclear test photos taken in 1970
Back in the mid-90s, I toured the Hanford Site in eastern Washington State with a small college class. (In the contemporary national security climate, [...]

My list of 15 books that left a lasting impression is full of science fiction, much of it very dark, and some of it apocalyptic. After ignoring the hype for a couple of years, I finally picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, only to become immediately annoyed with McCarthy’s pretentious, mannered style.
McCarthy’s writing is full [...]