This post first ran in 2023 Abstract Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous. Keywords: […]
Month: May 2026
In April, the sun started rising early enough so that I started walking or running near dawn. Each time I returned, there were people gathered underneath the same cluster of eucalyptus trees in the park and I didn’t ask why. I mean, I wondered why, but people do strange things sometimes. Then, a few weeks […]
I like to run this post on Memorial Day (the first version ran May 28, 2012) because when I think about soldiers and wars and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy. He was awfully opinionated and excessively direct but I admired him greatly and listened when he talked. Not he ever talked about the […]
Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up […]
The comb was found in a trash pile, what the archeologists call a midden, not far above the sea and just outside the remains of a longhouse. From the sit of the house and the site of the midden we know it was an easy toss: you could practically step outside and hurl food scraps, […]
My kid is on his way to university this year, and it’s hard not to get swept into doomscrolling opinion pieces. AI is going to take over everything and there will be no entry level jobs left. Did I do the wrong thing by encouraging my child’s interest in knowledge work? Should I have nudged […]
Have you noticed Mar-a-Lago face popping up in pop culture? It’s freaky. Certain conservative women and billionaires’ second wives—people who started out looking perfectly fine—now have puffy lips, exaggerated cheeks, and eyes that look perpetually surprised. I finally figured out what they remind me of: marionettes. They look like marionettes. With control-me, make-me-dance strings definitely […]
Over the last decade as my obsession with jumping spiders has grown, I’ve often wondered why some most people hate spiders. What is it about spiders that makes them particularly aversive? At first I was mostly just curious, but my conversations with arachnologists convinced me this question is actually important. Many researchers struggle to find […]
