Ann: Jenny has a new book out. It’s part of a series — best-selling, mind you — about unlikely relationships between animals and surprising animal heroics. (This one is called Unlikely Friendships: Dogs. It has a lot of dogs in it.) So far, I’ve read only the Amazon Read-Inside story about the dog and […]
Month: September 2016
A few years ago, while working on a story on the shark fin trade, I found myself freezing in the back of a panga 25 miles out from the Baja shoreline wishing I was dead. Partly it was tossing seas that pitched the skiff from side to side and slapped over the gunwales. Partly it […]
I took my place at the gray table in the gray, poorly-lit room, meeting the gaze of the eyeless skull staked upright before me. A stiff rectangular block of white wax was my only material, and a simple metal implement, sharp like a scalpel on one end and rounded like a spoon on the other, my only tool—other […]
Something about the way a river trip starts. Gear gets thrown in, arranged, tied down, and when the current picks up and carries you downstream, your sense of time and distance immediately changes. Connection to the other 7 billion or so people on the planet loosens, and connection to something bigger, and in ways smaller, […]
I love seeing bugs on windows, for reasons I’ve never fully worked out. I’ve even written about it before on this blog. Normally those bugs are on the outside of the window and I’m on the inside. That’s how I prefer it. I think the bugs prefer it that way, too. They are out in the world, taking […]
September 19 – 23, 2016 You know the charming idea of effortless art, that you get in the mood and a couple hours later, you’ve magically got an incisive and elegant story or post or podcast? That idea always has been purest nonsense but it also, Rose says, gets in the way of being paid. You […]
It is the size of a child, pelting through the forest with great dexterity. Quadrupedal but galloping with synchronized fore and hind steps. My concern is not this gentle, slender creature — whose mass, velocity, volume and weight distribution are crystal clear in my mind — but rather the imagined force or creature that set […]
I must tell you up front that Kathleen R. Walker, second author on “Aedes aegypti (Diptera: Culicidae) Longevity and Differential Emergence of Dengue Fever in Two Cities in Sonora, Mexico,” published recently in the Journal of Medical Entomology, is my stepdaughter. She’s an entomologist, she studies bugs; I occasionally have a bug question. I asked […]
