The first woman to get a Ph.D. in oceanography in the United States—and in North America, and, perhaps, in the world—was Easter Ellen Cupp. She received it from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1934. I learned this because I have been reading about one of Cupp’s supervisors, a man named Harald Sverdrup, for a […]
Month: February 2022
In 2019, a forest caught fire in Sussex, England. This would not have made international headlines, except that the forest in question was Ashdown Forest, the real-life inspiration for Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin’s beloved Hundred Acre Wood. As the fire spread, dry-eyed forest rangers explained to reporters that the blaze and the little […]
There is a lake not far from where I live now. I’m not a person who has ever invested deeply in place; I am a child of immigrants and I have always been somewhere temporarily. I don’t know the place where I was born, and as much as I love my hometown, I always knew […]
What parent hasn’t felt this grim determination at some point during the marathon that is modern, village-less childrearing? I instantly fell in love with this statue on a visit to Moscow (en route to the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic to visit a physics lab under a mountain). I can’t seem to find any information about the sculpture […]
This post originally appeared April 19, 2019 My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit […]
Helen: Hello! It is I, Helen! Let us have another vicious fight/discussion/debate about…pandemic life? Cameron: Yes! Let us! Although I don’t know if it will be a real fight this time, like all of our other very vicious fights. Would it be fair to say we are united in feeling slightly beaten down? Helen: Oh […]
Somehow I always knew there was something about my dad’s heart. I’m not sure exactly what I knew, but I did know that he didn’t eat certain things, like eggs and bacon, and ate other things, like canned tuna and low-fat cheese and margarine. (It was the eighties.) He enrolled in a cholesterol study. Bottles […]
In recent months, I’ve spent most of my time in Bremen, a coastal fishing village just down the peninsula from Damariscotta, Maine. Often my husband joins me. Bremen is Maine the way you think of it–our neighbors haul lobsters, dredge clams, pull kelp, and farm oysters. There’s an emergency doc who doubles as a vet […]
