Last fall I visited the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, where I stumbled across two fishbowls brimming with gallstones. They were donated, according to the placard, by a pathologist named Dr. S. Robert Freedman. Why, I wondered in an earlier post, would Dr. Freedman keep so very many stones? I couldn’t ask him — […]
Month: March 2026
Tomorrow, I fly down to the Magellanic penguin colony at Punta Tombo, Argentina, to apply some small tracking tags to penguins before they set off on their journeys north. I wrote this post a few years ago at the end of the same sort of trip, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing the […]
As I write this, the forecast calls for snow in the next day or so. It won’t be enough at my house, and certainly will be insufficient for the mountains. No matter how much snow falls at this point, it will be nowhere near enough to make up for our absolutely abysmal winter here in […]
In which Emily undergoes a trial which will stand her in good stead (what does that phrase even mean? can you stand in steads? what’s a stead? are some steads good and some bad?) when undergoing future trials. This first ran January 3, 2019. “This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we […]
I was walking my dog yesterday when I heard them. Sandhill cranes, their distinctive trill high overhead. It’s a few weeks early for them to be migrating through already, but it’s been a scary dry, warm winter and everything is off. So I stopped to listen and look up. It took a minute to find […]
