Feb 27 – March 2 This week, Richard wondered who explores in a world that no longer has undiscovered country Michelle considered the people who are lured by open, arid landscapes, even as the land tries its best to shake them off Christie explored the ongoing consequences of Agent Orange in Viet Nam, and the […]
Heather
Sometime in the winter of 1907 and 1908, an American researcher found a curious assortment of objects lying in a small pit in the Valley of the Kings. Theodore Davis, like many Egyptologists of the day, was looking for large, grand things, preferably royal tombs. So when he and his workers dug up several jars filled […]
Love is the opposite of the snowclone; unlike the apocryphal 200 words available to Eskimos to describe falling cold white stuff, the English language outrageously, improbably offers only a single option to encompass how we feel about pizza and our only child. And if language is the scaffolding against which we form our entire construct […]
A few years ago, one of my Scottish cousins decided to delve into the murky waters of family history. For a time, I received regular emails from him, dispatches containing faded photos of long-dead relatives; biographies pieced together from birth and death certificates, and short sad notes on the lives of the working poor in […]
In 1930, the legendary bartender Harry Craddock prescribed a popular cure for revellers who stumbled into London’s Savoy Hotel for breakfast and complained of throbbing hangovers. Craddock had fled Prohibition in the States in 1920 and found work at the American Bar in the Savoy, and he knew a thing or two about the ailments […]
Seventeen years ago, Canadian biologist Adrian Forsyth slipped into lyricism as he described the great wilderness known as Tambopata-Candamo in Peru. The cloud forests there, he wrote in an official report, “are dense with every limb matted with fern, orchid and moss and the only trails are those of the secretive spectacled bear and elusive […]
I probably shouldn’t say this, but I love it when scientists occasionally throw all caution to the wind and clamber out on what seems a visibly shaky limb. Not of course, when they are offering up some new off-the-wall theory on autism or sudden infant death syndrome or flu vaccines—fields in which a little speculation […]
There is something rare and elusive on the ceiling of Rouffignac Cave in southern France, something that at first looked like etchings of undulating snakes or bending waterways or even strangely shimmying humans, but that now turn out to be something far more ephemeral and wondrous to my eyes—works of art by very young apprentices: […]