updates
cmooney | February 11, 2006I'm out here in the Rockies, speaking Sunday night at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and then on Monday night at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver. More info on both talks can be found here.The Sunday talk was prominently written up in the Boulder Daily Camera (in the "Religion" section, of all places). It will be an official "Darwin Day" speech, hosted by the Boulder International Humanist Institute, and I plan to include some special remarks about what Charles Darwin means to me. So, I hope anyone in the Denver area who's interested will try to come on out for one of these…
cmooney | February 9, 2006Apparently my appearance on the podcast show of the Center for Inquiry was pretty successful. Here's a link. And once again, for those in Boston/Cambridge, I'm speaking at Tufts tonight. Here's more info. Hope you can make it.
cmooney | February 8, 2006Folks, I suffered from a major computer crash today, which prevented me not just from blogging but even from posting others' comments. It was a stressful, hellish day, but I managed to recover somewhat towards the end, and now I'm semi-operational again.
Anyway, I won't be blogging more today, but I do want to let those in the Boston area know that I'll be speaking at the Tufts Fletcher School tomorrow night. More info here. Unfortunately, I I didn't get to practice my speech quite like I would've wanted to today due to the aforementioned technological catastrophe. It's a new one and, I think…
cmooney | February 7, 2006I'm pleased that the renowned Yale science historian Daniel Kevles has reviewed The Republican War on Science in the latest issue of The American Scientist. Here's the upshot, criticisms of yours truly fully included:
The Union of Concerned Scientists has a point in that during the administration of George W. Bush the politicization of science can be found in numerous areas of public policymaking far beyond defense. Chris Mooney informatively develops that argument in The Republican War on Science. A young political journalist, he is at times snide and polemical, but he has done a lot of…
cmooney | February 3, 2006Once again, folks, I'll be doing an online chat at WashingtonPost.com today--in about two hours, or at 11 am ET--and I would love to hear your questions. I'll answer as many as possible. Blogging will resume here after I'm done posting over there....
cmooney | February 1, 2006A while back I did a public debate with Ron Bailey of Reason and Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute, sponsored by the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation. Well, Reason magazine has just put audio and video of the event online. Check it out here.
And another update: I'm doing a WashingtonPost.com "Live Online" discussion about The Republican War on Science this Friday at 11 pm ET. Here's the webpage. I hope many of you will tune in, and, hopefully, pose interesting questions.
cmooney | January 27, 2006Folks, I've been traveling, and while I thought I would be able to blog more on this trip (to Berkeley, CA), it hasn't happened due to technical difficulties and general fatigue. That's too bad, because there's a lot that I want to be writing about. But I'm afraid that I'm not going to be back at it until Monday....
cmooney | January 24, 2006I'm pleased to announce that along with PZ Myers and Wendy Northcutt (genius of the Darwin Awards), I'll be heading up the science panel at Yearly Kos, Friday, June 9 in Las Vegas. This is the progressive blogosphere's mega-convention; its theme is "Uniting the Netroots." The keynote speaker will be none other than Harry Reid. The event itself will run for four days (June 8-11) and will be located at the Riviera Hotel in Vegas. Thousands are expected; you should be one of them.
I'm honored and excited to have been invited to speak and to be part of this massive and important event. As I said…
cmooney | January 24, 2006I'm Google dependent, just like all the rest of you. But I heard about a new search function that's going live today, and I've been checking it out. (Full Disclosure: I heard from a friend here in D.C. who's involved in promoting this search.) The name is catchy--Dumbfind. It doesn't replace Google, and it takes some getting used to, but it seems to allow for better sifting of results for those who know exactly what they're looking for through the use of tags that organize the content, as explained here and here. As a bunch of science geeks, I figured that some of you folks might want to give…
cmooney | January 22, 2006Looks like a lot of the folks here at ScienceBlogs.com keep on going straight through the weekend. My habit is the opposite: For sanity, for relaxation, for a change of pace, I'm not a weekend blogger, unless there's something that I really think needs to be noted and can't wait. But when it comes to weekdays, I can always be expected to be posting--unless I'm traveling or hungover or something. And at least in the first case, you can expect a fair warning!
The readers of my old blog were familiar with this routine, I think, but there are a lot of new visitors here on the new site, so I…
cmooney | January 20, 2006I'm heading off to Boston for an event tonight. I may get to blog again from Beantown, or I may not. A couple of things to leave you with: First, check out the latest Bush administration science scandal. A government report was apparently doctored to take out references to the possibility that Navy sonar may have caused the beaching of a group of whales. Typical, I know, but do try to sustain the outrage, if you possibly can--at least until the weekend.
Meanwhile, just a reminder that I'm on Tavis Smiley tonight on PBS. Check your local listings; Tivo here.
cmooney | January 19, 2006Folks, I'll be appearing tomorrow night on The Tavis Smiley Show, on PBS, for a pretty thorough interview about the themes of my book. I had to do the interview by satellite, which is always a bit challenging, but I'm told it came off pretty well. For my local network, WETA, the show is on at midnight eastern (i.e., technically it airs on the 21st). You'll have to check your local listings if you're located somewhere else than Washington, D.C., but I do hope you can tune in. I'll provide another update tomorrow.
cmooney | January 16, 2006Well, I've been here at ScienceBlogs.com for a few days now, and would like to reflect a bit on the experience. Overall, I must say, I'm overwhelmingly pleased. I'm a technical moron and my old blog was held together with spitballs and sealing wax. It had big technical difficulties. By contrast, writing here has been very smooth, and it has been much easier to engage back-and-forth with commenters. The discussions following my posts have generally been much better as a result. (The fact that more people are reading and commenting now than before certainly doesn't hurt either.)
I also dig the…
cmooney | January 13, 2006The New York Sun covered my event last Tuesday, and it's a pretty interesting read. Check it out. It gives a pretty good sense of the tenor of the discussion that went on. Meanwhile, I'll have my second post about the substance of the issues discussed at the debate shortly (the first one was here).
cmooney | January 12, 2006I have started to assemble a new blogroll for this new blog--the one on my last site was extremely outdated. My general policy is going to be that I will not list blogs that are right here at ScienceBlogs, simply because anyone reading the site is naturally going to see what the other participants are posting daily anyway. (Although, I'm quite open to arguments about why I shouldn't run the blogroll this way.) So far I've just added five blogs that I can vouch for, more will be coming. Check out one of them, SciAm Observations, for a recent post from John Rennie about my debate with Ron…
cmooney | January 11, 2006Well, here I am, now officially blogging at scienceblogs.com, with its whizzbang technical features and its awesome collection of other science bloggers. I have little doubt that this site will become a dominant--if not the dominant--locus for science blogging on the web. Just check out the folks who are joining me here: Tara Smith, Tim Lambert, Ed Brayton, PZ Myers, and John Lynch, just to name a few.
It's exciting to be writing in this new location, though I certainly won't be getting rid of chriscmooney.com completely. For now, the site will remain as an archive of my prior blogging and…