I have, objectively speaking, done a lot of cool stuff in my life. I once spent six weeks on an icebreaker in the Bering Sea. I’ve seen toucans, monkeys, and whales in the wild. I keep going to Switzerland. I was once on the local news in Kumamoto, Japan. Actually, it may have been twice. […]
It was a week of thanks and turkeys. Scientists and editors claim not to like anthropomorphizing, but Ann did it anyway. With galaxies. Which breathe. No, really! Guest Nell Greenfieldboyce watched a spider go about its business in her window for weeks, then wrote about it, and it’s lovely. Those pronouncements on climate change? They […]
About halfway between my apartment and my office is a community garden. In a corner of that community garden is a milkweed plant. I first noticed it in early September, because of the brightly-colored animals crawling all over it. These, I learned from the internet (thanks, internet), are milkweed bugs. They eat milkweed seeds by […]
It doesn’t seem right that something as basic as time should be so annoying. No, it’s not time itself that’s annoying. I’ve more or less made peace with the fact that it’s marching on. The thing that’s annoying is when the stupid time keeps changing. In college, I appreciated that extra hour of sleep in […]
1. Washington, D.C., 2004 or so A bench around a circular planter, with a tree in it. I was eating my lunch. I felt something on my arm. We call it poop, but the stuff that comes out of birds’ behinds is more complicated than that. Birds, like most vertebrates that aren’t mammals, have a […]
My commute is the best part of my day. I know this is not normal. I live in the Northeast megalopolis. Commuting means drivers who are great at texting but unfamiliar with turn signals. Commuting means listening to people paid to be “funny” on drive-time radio. Commuting means waiting on a crowded platform for a […]
In a dark gallery alongside Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, a horde of glowy, gelatinous bulbs are drifting. A living lava lamp, someone calls them, and that’s what they are – jellyfish, mesmerizingly lit for the benefit of visitors to the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Aquariums have been keeping jellies for years. I first saw them at […]
After my voice lesson Sunday afternoon, I heard bells. Eight bells, ringing on and on. My voice lessons are in the bowels of Washington National Cathedral – a real live Gothic cathedral, hand-carved over the last 107 years by bearded Englishmen, or at least the group included one bearded Englishman who lives in my neighborhood. […]
