My newest piece for the Boston Globe Ideas section came out October 3! “Against the Flow,” explores the idea of entropy and the moments when things swirl back against the downward dispersal of energy – vortices that emerge briefly. It was inspired by my dad’s physics lecture that references Robert Frost’s poem West Running Brook, and researching around that in turn led me to recent work by MIT’s Jeremy England on the connection between Entropy and Life, and much more. I plan to devote a post to this in the coming month or two on the process and all that went into this. I’m pretty excited about how the piece came together on a lot of levels. It’s a large piece, the Globe devoted an entire page to it(!) but it may be a bit difficult to see it in full online. See it on the Globe’s site here, and you can also see my earlier piece “Upwards” on my site here.
I recently did an interview with Forrest Helvie for the comics-culture site Newsarama. We talked everything from making comics in academia, academic publishing colliding with comics shop practices, and my influences. See it in full here. More reviews and interviews can be found here or on my press page here.
Last week, I was in Berlin for what turned out to be 36 hours (!), to present at a symposium on science and comics called the Anthropocene Kitchen at Humboldt University. Great conversation around what comics can do, and how they can be used in an educational and informative manner – without losing what makes them comics. And Berlin is an amazing city I hope I can get back to it for a longer stay. (Sketch of my talk above by the artist Maki Shimizu and graffiti unknown.)
This weekend I’m off to Austin to participate in the Texas Book Festival. I’m on a panel alongside the great designer Chip Kidd! The conversation is hosted by Evan Garza – and if you’re in Austin, it’s at 12:45 Saturday the 17th, at the The Sanctuary at First United Methodist Church (1201 Lavaca. Looking forward to being a part of this dynamic gathering of authors and conversations to come. More info here. Thanks for the support! – Nick