Catherine Price

It was a bad move for someone who hates boats: I spent 2 weeks at sea with a crew of marine biologists and students from Stanford, documenting the journey from the Line Islands to Honolulu and creating this website. (Don’t know where the Line Islands are? Take a map of the Pacific Ocean and stick a pin somewhere directly in the middle.)

Even if you ignore ( from ignorare — to not know, disregard) the Romans’ influence ( influere — to flow in) on our culture ( colere — to foster, cultivate or respect), architecture ( architectus, from the Greek arkhi — chief + tekton — builder, carpenter), literature ( littera — letter), government (gubernare — navigate, pilot, govern), military (miles — soldier), legal ( lex — the law) and judicial (iudex — a judge) systems and medicine ( medicus — physician), there’s still the fact ( factum — something done, a fact) of Latin’s presence ( praesentia — presence) in English itself.

As might be obvious, getting to write a feature about Latin for the Washington Post Magazine was a treat for my inner dork.

For Mother Jones, I created several web videos to accompany my article about Christian magicians. The first one’s about Jilly Bean, followed by this magic trick:

Others on the site feature Kerry Kistler, chalk artist:

and Duane Laflin, revered gospel magician:

I just had the chance to speak about my article in Popular Science, Rebooting the Body, on the New Hampshire Public Radio show Word of Mouth. (For those who missed it, it’s about how a new drug, currently known as teplizumab, might be able to halt the progress of Type 1 diabetes — and potentially have uses in other autoimmune diseases.)

You can read more about the segment — and listen to the interview — here.

An organizational shopping spree left me wondering about the philosophical significance of the Container Store — so I wrote an essay about it, a condensed version of which aired on American Public Media’s Marketplace.

Thanks to my editorial about how Michael Pollan ruined my life, Marketplace asked me to do a commentary about orthorexia — an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy.

When I wrote an article for Greater Good Magazine (and then Alternet) about the science of gratitude, I had no idea it’d have so much resonance. Around Thanksgiving I was asked to come on the NPR show Humankind to talk about my gratitude experiment.

Thanks to an article I wrote about gratitude for Greater Good Magazine (picked up here by Alternet, I was invited to participate in the NPR affiliate show, Sound of Ideas for their Thanksgiving episode.

In the summer of 2006, I spent a month in Korea reporting on the American military for a Knight Foundation fellowship called News 21. We reported on base closures and community relations, but my personal stories focused on things like working out at 5am with a colonel, learning to shoot a semi-automatic weapon, and spending a night on the town with a 19-year-old soldier (he liked to salsa).