I recently informed my wife that I was thinking about shutting down this blog. “I thought you shut it down a long time ago,” she replied. It’s hard to argue with the facts. When I started this blog, I rattled off twelve posts in the first two months. By comparison, I’ve published just seven posts (including this one) over the past two years. In the first year, I wrote more than fifty posts. In the past year, I’ve written just one post, and that was eleven months ago. I skipped the annual best-of list altogether.
At least I’m not alone. In fact, many people now regard the blog as something of an ancient medium (examples here, here, and here). I can’t claim any foresight. In fact, I wish I still had time to blog about the news. Just this week, a team of researchers from Yale announced that they had “partially revived” pig brains hours after the animals had died (read more here and here). Last week, a team of researchers in China announced that they had genetically engineered monkeys using human genes in an explicit attempt to make them smarter (learn more here). I’m still giving these stories the attention and reflection they deserve, but I am now doing it on the clock. You may recall that I was a newly minted PhD with no job and no prospects when I launched this website way back in 2013. Now that I’m a full-time postdoc in the amazing Center for Biology and Society at ASU, I’m focused on the various tasks for which I’m being paid.
More importantly, I have learned to prioritize different things. My wife and I are expecting our first baby in the next few weeks, and we could not be more excited. I’ll try to post an update when I think about it, but I’m guessing I’ll have other things on my mind for the foreseeable future.
Since my first-ever blog post cited the greatest opening in musical history (the first twelve seconds of “Try a Little Tenderness” by Otis Redding), I’ll close this post (if not this blog) with the greatest closing in musical history. Once again provided by Otis Redding (who else?), the whistling outro from “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” offers a meditation on contented waiting. Click this link to hear for yourself. Until next time…