There are several things you’re likely to notice if you fly over Southeast Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago on a clear day. If you’re an alpine junky like me, the first will be the snowcapped mountains that stretch seemingly without end from near the coast to the eastern horizon somewhere in Canada, their white-and-gray-tongued glaciers pouring all […]
Animals
One of my favorite things about my usual writing beat (living things) is that we humans never stop learning new things about animals. We’re even still discovering species that are new to science. (Check out the glorious ruby sea dragon, previously known only from beach corpses, and Hoolock tianxing, a gibbon just determined to be its own […]
A little before Christmas I saw a stage production of Moby Dick. It was a wonderful production, by the Lookingglass Theater Company from Chicago, so creative in how it showed the depicted life at sea and on land. Actors climbed around in the rigging and dangled by their ankles. While the ship’s crew was thoroughly […]
Being single as a 35-year-old woman in the tech age is an interesting science experiment. There’s a lot that’s cool about it, like your time is all your own, you actually feel pretty good in your skin and you have some solid sense of what you want. You also get to tinker with tools of […]
Any suburban teenager can tell you that rumors live and die in the over-lit hallways of malls. How many times was I dumped outside a Wet Seal? None, because I was not popular enough to have boyfriends in high school. But plenty of other people were! Anyway, you know what I mean. Malls are the […]
I’ve written before about how much I like seeing a bug on a window. Usually I see those bugs on the outside. This is a story about a bug that I saw on the inside. It was a chilly morning in November. I was in a hotel in Tatopani, a Nepali town along the Kali […]
The girl sits on the edge of the chair with her knees pressed together, hands twisting in her lap and chin jutting out slightly. Her braids are tight and smooth, hanging just past her shoulders and secured with matching red bands. A little comic strip kid, neatly drawn, eyes big and sparkling. “I can’t believe […]
I have been paying attention to poop and where I find it. This isn’t a passing interest, I’ve been noting for years where animals choose to squat. In the out of doors, you can’t help noticing because they squatted to get your attention, like a billboard that reads GOTCHA! With a little chub of scat […]
