It's been a while

So my first post was in 2009. I think it's about time for another. It turns out I've written a book, on the search for Earthlike planets around other stars. The title is Mirror Earth, and it should be out next fall.

I'll be talking about it a lot more as the October publication date approaches, but imagine my pleasant surprise when I learned that the Washington Post just included it on a list of "10 books we're looking forward to this fall." I was even more surprised, and even more pleasantly, when I saw that the other nine included books by J.K. Rowling, Oliver Sacks, Alice Munro, Michael Chabon and Tom Wolfe (and several other authors whose names are a lot more widely known than mine.

This doesn't guarantee success, obviously. But it certainly doesn't hurt.

Inaugural post

OK, this is really just a test. My good friend Jeremy Caplan told me that this was a good way to create a web page with a minimum of fuss, and I'm intrigued. Just to introduce myself, I'm a journalist, formerly with TIME magazine and now working at a nonprofit climate-change communications organization called Climate Central. So let's see how this looks...