… or so it sometimes seems. Some surprising, counter-intuitive thoughts about eating healthy, from a Washington Post blog (via Deborah Blum).

There’s nothing like a gorgeous summer day in Oregon. Just spent part of the weekend at local farmer’s markets, where the people are friendly, the produce is beautiful, and the prices are sky-high (c’mon, folks, $1 per leek?). I  love eating fresh,untainted vegetables and fruits, but wish that somebody would figure out how to keep [...]

See geneticist Pamela Ronald’s thoughts here. The point is that not all GMO crops are the same, they’re generally safe, and we should judge them on a case-by-case basis instead of painting them all as bad or all as good. Sounds reasonable to me.  Ronald is married to an organic farmer, and together they’ve tried [...]

I’ve just released my 1995 biography of Linus Pauling, Force of Nature, for the Kindle platform. This book holds a special place in my writer’s heart — it was my first big-time solo book, published by a big publisher (Simon & Schuster), for decent money, and got some terrific reviews — so I’m glad to [...]

Well, this is swell. I received an email this morning saying that Raj Shah likes my book, “The Alchemy of Air.”  For those of you who don’t know,  Shah came out of the Dept. Agriculture, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and now heads USAID, the central agency for distributing tens of billions of [...]

Oregon Public Broadcasting put together a terrific new one-hour documentary on the life of Linus Pauling. It aired last night, but because we don’t get television signals at our house I didn’t get to watch it until today, when they started streaming it. I think it’s  very well produced and shot, quite complete, plenty of [...]

Nice to see some good news for a change: Since the 1970s, significant improvements in US air quality have been matched by a steady rise in life expectancy.  We all owe thanks to everyone who worked on the Clean Air Act.

I write about science as a mixed bag — in other words, I try to note its limits as well as its successes. Science and a modern sense of the rational have been around for more than three centuries, and by now it seems these ways of thinking would have triumphed, displacing all the old [...]

It’s nice to see medical students getting something out of my work, as in this  Adjacent Possible Medicine blog post

There’s always plenty of bad news to worry about. All you have to do is read the front page of your local paper or listen to a few excruciating minutes of the daily digest of disaster we call television news to fall into a sort of black funk about the fate of the world. So [...]