Loose Ends

I usually avoid talking to people at the gym. But a few weeks ago, the man next to me had his shoes untied, and I couldn’t help myself. The laces were bright red, and extremely long. He was doing side steps that looked like they had high trip potential. And I was extra-sensitive to falls […]

The Last Word

May 14-18, 2018 To start the week, Emma has some good news: butterflies are adapting more nimbly to the Anthropocene that some might have thought. This happy ending surprised the researchers. “Our mindset in 2014 was simply to reconfirm the extinction, and we were very surprised to find larvae,” they write. To be fair, ecologists […]

The Last Word

April 23-27, 2018 Rose starts the week gathering some ideas on creativity, like so many eels. How does one catch eels? Bare handed? Do I design myself some gloves? Or some kind of hunting stick, or camera trap? Maybe I should sing to the eels, to make them feel safe. I need to become an […]

The Last Word

March 19-23, 2018 Sarah knows so many lovely words, and on Monday, writes about learning even more. When they talked among themselves, they spoke exclusively in Chilean Spanish, which, one of them—Fernando—gravely informed me, is even worse for outsiders than Argentine Spanish. I was awash in a sea of musical sounds whose meanings I could only grasp at […]

Whatever Trees

There’s a quote I’ve seen attributed to Ram Dass about why we should turn people into trees. When we look at people (or ourselves), we judge. We compare. We criticize. But for trees, Ram Dass says, it’s different. “Some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, […]

The Last Word

February 12-16, 2018 The Tesla/SpaceX launch left Rebecca exhilarated—but she knows not everyone felt the same way. Plenty of people didn’t like it because they argue we have enough to deal with here on Earth. Some people were unhappy because they don’t like Elon Musk, who owns the rocket and the car. And some people […]

The Last Word

February 5-9, 2018 Jessa starts off the week by writing about a Canadian researcher on an Arctic icebreaker who tracks radioactive material released after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. The atmospheric release took eight days to reach Cullen’s home in Victoria, British Columbia, and most of it ended up in the North Pacific. Ultimately it […]

The Last Word

January 22-26, 2018 Emma has sage advice for ditching your phone, which may be one of many things that’s making you miserable. Give your phone to your children and ask them to hide it. A fun game for the whole family! Tell them they can’t tell you where it is, even if you start to […]