When I was a kid, my mom would measure time for me in units of Sesame Street. During a road trip when I’d inevitably ask, “Are we there yet?” she might answer, we’ll be there in two Sesame Streets. For a kid, two hours can seem like forever. We imagine the world through the lens of […]
Month: June 2014
María Juan’s pain began eight years ago, at lunchtime. She was dining with her parents when suddenly she felt a sharp jab under her tongue. “Like an aguja,” she says — a needle. Each time she tried to swallow, she felt another poke. After the meal ended, the pain subsided. At dinner, however, it returned. […]
I was reading the end-of-semester student essays in the Science as Narrative course I teach when one phrase stopped me. Stopped me as in, I didn’t go on: “Darwin was happy to be tasked with telling a fire by its ashes.” Was it an actual thing, I wondered, this “telling a fire by its ashes”? I […]
Allow me to introduce you to the hugag, a moose-like creature native to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and eastern Canada. “Its head and neck are leathery and hairless; its strangely corrugated ears flop downward,” wrote William Cox, the first state forester of Minnesota. “Its four-toed feet, long bushy tail, shaggy coat and general make-up give the beast […]
June 2-6, 2014 This week began with cosmic conundrums. Jessa looked at the maladies astronauts suffer after long periods in zero gravity. For Mars-bound explorers of the future, the toll on their bodies–and their psyches–is unknown. “Travelers won’t even see stars. Outside the window, there will be blackness. Utter blackness.” And Ann wrestled with what to […]
People say that writing a book is something of an obsession. It has to be. Why else would you turn over your life for several years to, say, the sex life of bedbugs or the dark energy driving the universe? In our case, it was 18th-century Iceland that did us in — more specifically, a […]
A local restaurant reviewer has a monthly feature in which he lists openings and closings of eateries around town. The list only contains the restaurants’ names and addresses, which always seems especially stark when it comes to the places that have shut their doors. It’s the culinary equivalent of a gravestone. There’s nothing about the buckwheat crepe […]
We haven’t had a Triple Crown winner in 36 years, since a horse named Affirmed won in 1978. This year, there’s a lot of buzz around a chestnut colt named California Chrome. He’s already won the Kentucky Derby and The Preakness, and word is he has a good chance to win Saturday’s mile-and-one-half Belmont Stakes, […]
