Goddard MFA faculty member Richard Panek‘s collaboration with Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain, has received a Wise Award for popular science writing published in Poland in 2016. Originally published in the U.S. by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2013, The Autistic Brain was …
“Vera Rubin Didn’t Discover Dark Matter,” MFAW-VT faculty member Richard Panek‘s tribute to revolutionary American astroner Vera Rubin, is live at ScientificAmerican.com. Rubin (1928-2016) pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates and uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and …
By Richard Panek The middle finger of Galileo’s right hand is a satisfying sight. Not because the resemblance to an obscene gesture is unmistakable (though that’s pretty amusing). And not because such a gesture might suggest that in the end a scientist who suffered …
By Richard Panek You’d think a wall panel in the Galileo gallery in the Galileo wing of the Galileo Museum would be a good place to get an accurate context for Galileo’s historical significance. You’d be wrong: “These astronomical discoveries …
By Richard Panek The doctor was sitting in a chair next to the window, gazing out. His features gave nothing away, save serious thought. I watched him from my hospital bed, trying to discern meaning in his own effort to …
by Chana Porter There is a TV show called Orphan Black which follows a woman as she discovers that she has many identical clones all over the world, the intentional orphans of a top secret genetics project. I’m most interested …
Although both had been feminist writers and peace activists living in Brooklyn, NY for many years, playwright Karen Malpede and poet/novelist Jan Clausen didn’t know each other very well until they spent a night in jail together following a civil …
Tonight the 2015 Major League Baseball season opens at Chicago’s Wrigley Field with a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the host Chicago Cubs. This essay originally appeared a year ago on The Last Word on Nothing, a science writers’ collective, in …
By Richard Panek How could it happen? Was it the wrath of God or the malice of Poland? Was the crew drunk or was the Vasa wrongly built? The town was alive with rumours. I’ll bet it was. On August …
(This essay was the author’s faculty reading at a recent MFAW-VT residency. It commemorates an event that happened 51 years ago this week.) By Richard Panek I was watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” recently when I got to thinking …
What happens when the projector doesn’t work? The Haybarn Theater on the Plainfield campus has a beautiful new sound system, concert-worthy; state of the art lighting; a rich red velvet curtain; a podium that adjusts for height at the press of …
From The Last Word on Nothing, by Richard Panek: If you haven’t seen the movie Interstellar, you might not recognize the image above. It’s the black hole that figures prominently in the climax. But even if you have seen the movie, …