News of the Superfabulous Sort

The winners of this year's AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award have just been announced. I'm honored to be the winner for large newspapers. (I submitted some of my articles over the past year in The New York Times.) The whole enterprise of handing out awards for science journalism is fraught with gloomy undertones these days, of course. Last year's newspaper winners actually lost their jobs by the time the awards were announced. But even as we struggle on, it's reassuring that there are chances to get some recognition for striving to do our best, to make as much sense of the world as we can manage in plain English. And I'm particularly grateful that the folks at the New York Times indulges me in my curiosity about basic questions about the nature of life--like why fireflies flash.