I love the prickly, dry ecology of the northern California foothills. I love even it in late summer, when nothing is left of most plants and people but an exhausted, brittle husk. That is when my favorite plant, the California buckeye, or Aesculus californica, comes into its own. Unlike me, Aesculus californica knows when […]
Earlier this summer, as I lay with my head on my boyfriend’s chest, I heard something odd. His heart — an efficient athlete’s organ that normally thumps fewer than 50 times per minute at rest— switched from its reassuring, steady bah-buhm, bah-buhm, bah-buhm to rapid staccato: bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah. I lifted my head and asked if he’d noticed it. Pete […]
This was my first guest post for LWON, in 2015. I’m reposting it because there’s yet another update: A few days ago, my mother revealed that, CONTRARY TO ALL HER PREVIOUS CLAIMS, it was the cat. … This week, while working on a little story for Science about hamster emotions, I decided to do some […]
In 2015, Sarah Grimes picked up this river otter’s carcass on a rugged beach covered in tumbled sea glass. She removed its skin and flesh and soaked its bones first in warm water, then Borax. She kept each section of the skeleton — legs, paws, spine – in a separate mesh bag so the bones […]
Late at night, after the campers at Puddingstone Lake RV park in Los Angeles County have gone to bed, Ted Stankowich and his graduate students set up infrared cameras and speakers around an open field. They open cans of cat food and fling chunks of it all over the grass. Then they wait. The skunks come in droves. Some wear metal ear cuffs and RFID tags. Others […]
When I was a teenager, I started writing letters to myself, sealing them, and promising not to open them until a few weeks later. This is how I trained myself not to act on the suicidal thoughts I started having around 11 – the same year I got my period, and around the same age […]
“It’s made of solid iron, it weighs a ton or two, we know you’d like to meet it, it wants to meet you too!” – The Anvil Song, Animaniacs My friend Brian spends a lot of time in a marvelous, mostly empty old barn. The barn is everything a barn should be – high wooden […]
Notre Dame is on fire! one of my oldest friends, Jessica, texted me from New York the morning of April 15th. I saw. So awful, I typed back. Then I lost cell service. Pete and I were driving toward Yosemite, taking advantage of his spring break from teaching high school to explore the park. After paying […]