This post originally ran in 2018. Nothing has changed. I still won’t go to bed. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME! Yesterday at 8:23am, my husband texted me a link. No note, just a string of random letters and slashes and dots. I clicked and landed on a research article titled “Why don’t you go to bed […]
My family spent this spring break in Costa Rica. We went, of course, for the wildlife. Unfortunately, so did everyone else. Manuel Antonio National Park, on the Pacific coast, is one of the prime spots for seeing biodiversity. I had been there before nearly two decades ago, but friends warned me that it had changed. […]
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 — […]
The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago holds many delights — an iron lung, a collection of old forceps, an X-ray shoe fitter. But none of them stuck with me quite like the glass case that held two fishbowls brimming with stones removed from people’s bodies. gallstones, kidney stones, and bladder stones. According to […]
Dear readers: Everything is (once again?) terrible. At least in this country. It feels like a roller coaster descent into the worst parts of history. My brain spends its days vacillating between wild panic and stubborn denial. I guess what I’m saying is this: I’ve got nothing for you unless you want a funeral wail […]
My daughter’s obsession with capybaras began about six months ago. One day she was drawing mushrooms with cat ears, the next she was drawing capybaras and only capybaras. She watches videos of capybaras. She sings the capybara song. She purchased a capybara stuffie that is also, improbably, a burger. She taped a piece of notebook […]
Summer walks have me thinking about worm sex. I witnessed it in Brooklyn, but never in Wisconsin, where I now reside. Enjoy this post from 2012. It’s timeless because, well, worm sex is timeless. My husband and I often take nighttime walks. On one such walk, I noticed something strange on the ground. It looked […]
In 2018, I wrote the post below about bedtime procrastination. The term was new to me, the concept was not. I was a bedtime procrastinator. And, spoiler alert, I still am a bedtime procrastinator. Zero improvement. There’s a new term now, an even more delicious one: Revenge bedtime procrastination. Here’s how a Web MD article […]