I'm a historian who writes about modern science and technology: how they got to be the way they are, how they shaped (and were shaped by) the way people live their lives, and (especially) the stories we tell ourselves in order to try and make sense of them. I'm also interested in the stories we tell ourselves about the past, and the ways we try to capture it -- and make sense of it -- in movies and monuments, songs and schoolbooks. Along the way, I've written about rockets & missiles, atomic bombs, fossil mammoths, sailing ships, stone tools, zombie outlaws, time-traveling heroes, Walt Disney's vision of the future, the significance of Amelia Earhart's leather jacket, and why (in cartoons) gravity only affects you when you think about it.For the demographically curious, I'm . . . fifty-something, 6-foot-3, left handed, the son of a teacher and a social worker, a product of Massachusetts public schools, a graduate of Brown University (BA 1985) and the University of Wisconsin (MA 1987, PhD 1990), and the owner of an aging Toyota minivan, a vintage 21-foot racing sloop, and far more books than I have shelves to put them on.