Archive (Page 2) • SCALES • Buttondown

SCALES #32: Darwin to Tahiti

February 1, 2018

Hello! Jumping right into The Culture Section this week. ▢ ▢ ▢ At the symphony I saw Thomas Adès conduct the Boston Symphony and the program was so good:...

SCALES #31: root systems

January 25, 2018

Hello! I've been working on getting everything, including some new-and-improved instrumentation, set up for another round of levitated droplet experiments....

SCALES #30: mixed clouds

January 18, 2018

Hello! In February 1922 Tor Bergeron was at a health resort outside of Oslo. He was on a multi-week break before starting a new position in Bergen, Norway,...

SCALES #29: cold connoisseur

January 11, 2018

Hello! The snow here in greater Cambridge has progressed to the dirty piles of slush phase and most of the sidewalks are finally clear. (I got angry seeing a...

SCALES #28: drinking deep

January 4, 2018

Hello, and happy 2018! SCALES is back, after a conference/holiday travel hiatus. As I'm writing this, the first flakes of the hyped East Coast cyclone...

SCALES #27: "Oh plum! My Captain!"

December 2, 2017

Hello! Happy December. This newsletter is back. A bunch of newsletter-unfriendly Thursdays have flown by and I've finally realized I'd rather get one out...

SCALES #26: lookin back, lookin back, lookin back

November 8, 2017

Hello! This issue: just a few short follow-up items. SCALES #25 and writing about music. I've been reading more of Ben Ratliff's Every Song Ever and my...

SCALES #25: head inside the speakers

November 2, 2017

Hello! Since last we checked in, my 2017 Spotify playlist has exploded in size. If at midyear it was the length of 1 or 2 CDs, a size my mind can grasp as a...

SCALES #24: historic cemetery

October 27, 2017

Hello! Welcome to a special Friday edition of SCALES! Conference travel last week, a conference-induced cold, and some busyness this week all kept this...

SCALES #23: granite, hornblende-schist, and the rest

October 12, 2017

Hello! I finished A.S. Byatt's Possession and found it a deeply pleasurable book to read—knowing satires of all these different literary scholar types; some...

SCALES #22: pumpkin harbor traversal

October 5, 2017

Hello! Starting to feel like Real Fall here in the Bay State. A spooky house sprouted overnight across the street from my apartment. I recently drove out to...

SCALES #21: fishing for alewives

September 20, 2017

Hello! I'm back! Season Two of SCALES. And welcome new subscribers! A warning that I couldn't resist using this issue to scrape out the backlog of links I...

SCALES #20: entr'acte

Hello! This marks the end of the first season of SCALES. A handful of inspirations come to mind for wrapping these first twenty (20!) newsletters up in a bow...

SCALES #19: "local bananas"

Hello! It's a short ("short") links-only week. ▢ ▢ ▢ Jill Lepore, interviewed: "Wouldn’t it be interesting to write the history of the editor, as a figure...

SCALES #18: idle idol idyll

Hello! Last weekend I struck out to my favorite donut place in these parts. I had been itching to get out into nature more, so then I made an impulse...

SCALES #17: ice-lolly formation

Hello! Brain is feeling a little emptied out, but I want to fill up a newsletter with links, so here we go! ▢ ▢ ▢ My current coping method with awful...

SCALES #16: "at least 127 colossal underground pillars"

Hello! Stayed up way too late last night finishing The North Water by Ian McGuire: nasty, brutish, short tale of a late-period whaling expedition that (of...

Hello! I've been ever-so-slowly making way through Teju Cole's essay collection, Known and Strange Things, and maybe unsurprisingly based on how much I liked...

SCALES #14: "The tool to find out who you are"

Hello! Commencement day in Harvardland. Red-robed folk walking down Mass Ave and around the Square early this morning, which I can't help but smile at. Gown...

Hello! I'm back from two weeks off due to a variety of reasons (going to a wedding! going to a graduation! thesis committee meeting!). Latest update from lab...

Hello! Links only this week. ▢ ▢ ▢ So I've been listening to this podcast... Koji on Gastropod. (Also excellent to see them live at the Museum of Science.)...

Hello! Some code-wrangling this week in lab. For a while I've needed a way to automate extracting my data from the mass spectrometer. The commercial software...

Hello! After a long time in the wilderness of struggling to get an experiment working (not completely finished even now), I'm starting on some preliminary...

Hello! I've almost finished reading Outline by Rachel Cusk. Fresh off of Anna Karenina it feels like I've been flying through the pages. I am a sucker for...

Hello! Yesterday I went to a talk by Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator during Obama's second term. (One of the baldest illustrations of élite privilege at...

Hello! I just finished reading Anna Karenina. It's been quite the process, full of failed attempts (and a viewing of the Tom Stoppard-penned film adaptation,...

Hello! In honor of the start of US Daylight Savings Time (and the confusion it caused me for a video call to Switzerland), I wanted to know, what exactly is...

Hello! Recently I've been listening to quite a bit of music on my old portable touchscreen-enabled listening device™, which has taken on the role of an...

Hello! One thing that blew my nineteen-year-old mind in Music History 101 was a critical approach to the idea of virtuosity. Growing up taking classical...

February 24, 2017

Hello! Over time I've learned there's an entire atlas's worth of atmospheric chemistry place names. The most famous is probably Mauna Loa, home of the...

February 17, 2017

Hello! Almost immediately after I sent the newsletter last week, I felt guilty about breezily mentioning all these other newsletters that I was ripping off,...

February 9, 2017

Hello, I've started a newsletter! The unpublished pilot episode goes into great detail justifying why I'm doing so, my thoughts about the shortcomings of...