Minda Berbeco

When I was in my mid-twenties, my brother had a crazy idea to ditch out on work for a month to walk the Camino de Santiago. For those not familiar, the Camino is an ancient path walked by Catholics and spiritual well-wishers (think Pablo Neruda and Shirley MacLaine) to the resting place of Saint James. … Read more

As I’ve written many times before, being married to a food writer has exposed me to unusual, delicious, disturbing and most of all, abundant amounts of food. I’ve found myself in numerous gluttonous situations where I’ve had to offend many by insisting, “no, no, if I eat one more bite, I *really* will explode. Seriously. … Read more

Being a Bostonian in the Bay area is a weird experience. The summers are freezing, the winters mild and the spring and fall are the warmest part of the year. When leaving the house yesterday on a balmy morning, I shouted to my neighbor, “Wow, it’s summer already!” “It’s spring!” he replied. I realized afterwards … Read more

When I started writing my blog, I noticed a direct relationship between titles and clicks. Fart in the title? That was pretty popular. Sex? Loads of clicks. Sexual dysfunction? Even more. Clown fish incest? Wow, you people are weird. My boss at the time attributed this to a common adage in the publishing industry: there … Read more

This past December, my husband and I were invited to participate in an Iron Chef cook-off, where contestants were given an ingredient and had to create the most interesting, delicious and unusual dish possible. This was a challenge that we thought we’d mastered – we’ve previously won cooking competitions galore (first prize key lime pie, … Read more

It is a rite of passage after moving to Northern California to take on your first diet. I’m not talking about dieting to lose weight, nor am I talking about those boring diets that are popular everywhere else in the sensible world, such as vegetarianism, veganism or even ovo-lacto-pescatarianism. Those diets are a little too … Read more

When traveling the world, you find yourself taking a lot of risks. Often you’ll reflect back on these travels and think: “I can’t believe I got into that car” or “My god! That man was not showing me his knife so I would buy it, he was trying to rob me!” This is never clearer … Read more

It is tough being a freelance writer. You have to be pitching stories left and right, grabbing interviews whenever you can and literally dance for every drink, every lunch and every story. Meanwhile, any jerk with a blog could come along and steal your job. Your life is best defined by these three words: Dance, … Read more

One of the greatest challenges of writing a science blog is that I generally have 800 words to describe something extremely complex. Take my blog on Lyme Disease. Lyme disease has many hosts, from ticks to mice to humans, even lizards. The animals are affected by tons of variables, climate being only one of them, … Read more

In my job I get to learn a bit about the common arguments against climate change. As I’ve mentioned before, the new charge is not that it doesn’t exist, it’s that it is just too hard to do anything about climate change right now. It’s too expensive, the technology is just not there, we need … Read more