Last week, I fell in the Thames. I only fell in up to my thighs, but the gaping, bleeding puncture on my shin, inside which I could see geologic-looking layers of anatomy — that was a bad sign. So I found myself at the A&E (that’s ER to you, fellow ‘Mericans) at 4 in the […]
Month: November 2011
This past summer, I spent two weeks sitting, working and, once, sleeping next to a hospital bed, trying and failing to communicate with my father. He had called for an ambulance on the evening of July 25 because he couldn’t breathe. With end-stage emphysema, he often couldn’t breathe, but apparently that night he was frightened […]
I’ve spent a lot of time this past year thinking and writing about extinction, which means I’ve also spent a lot of time drinking thinking about the tragic narrative in environmental journalism. There’s a lot of genuine tragedy on the environmental beat, and it doesn’t take a partisan to see it. There’s not a whole […]
Seventeen years ago, Canadian biologist Adrian Forsyth slipped into lyricism as he described the great wilderness known as Tambopata-Candamo in Peru. The cloud forests there, he wrote in an official report, “are dense with every limb matted with fern, orchid and moss and the only trails are those of the secretive spectacled bear and elusive […]
I was helping an astronomer write a sentence. It was about disentangling the color a supernova has intrinsically, from the reddening in its color caused by cosmic dust. He wrote he wanted to “break the degeneracy” between the colors. Break the degeneracy. I got so excited. I’d always thought degenerates were people who didn’t, for […]
The case against accused child molester Jerry Sandusky includes testimony about eight victims, and the New York Times is reporting that ten more have stepped forward since the case became public. These allegations present a pattern of abuse that extends over more than a decade, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has said he expects more […]
A few weeks ago, driving across Navajoland in northeast Arizona, I stopped to see some dinosaur tracks just west of Tuba City. As I pulled into the parking area, on the north side of highway 160, a Navajo man got up from a group sitting in lawn chairs by a hand written “Dino Tracks” sign. […]
As far as obscure ecosystems go, the outer edge of expanding sea-ice sheets has got to be near the top of the list. Not algae-living-in-sloth-hairs obscure, I suppose, but then the algae that grow inside the sea ice have a significantly greater impact on just about everything else in the world, other than sloth hair. […]
