Last summer my iPhone went kaput, the victim of a bass-fishing accident and a case that proved to be, upon close review of fine print, water-resistant rather than water-proof. The distinction was not semantic. When the screen turned fuzzy red plaid, a color and pattern better suited to a kilt than to liquid crystal, I […]
The legend begins thus: In 1967 — or maybe it was ’66 — a pet store truck overturned in Long Island, sending a few dozen finger-length Italian wall lizards scampering into the bushes of Garden City. There Podarcis siculus thrived, slurping up arthropods along rock walls and sidewalks, dodging beaks and claws and tires. Over the decades, […]
In 1974, the neurologist Oliver Sacks was hiking alone on a Norwegian mountain when, coming around a boulder, he stumbled upon a bull sprawled across the trail. The bull didn’t react, but Sacks, no stranger to hallucinations, somehow imagined the animal as “first a monster, and now the Devil.” As he fled downhill in a […]