I’m standing in my underwear and socks, gripping a rolled-up magazine that is shredded at the end from my violent battle with the flies. I’ve killed a dozen or more of them this Wednesday morning, but they just keep alighting as if there is some source—a pile of dog shit, a rotting corpse—hidden just there, […]
Miscellaneous
Jessa Gamble is embedded in an experimental evolution lab at the University of Ottawa. What I cannot simulate, stepping into the daily life of a lab and its early career researchers, is the stress they feel. I do not, except vicariously, buzz with the manic tension of finalizing a five-year NSERC grant. I am not […]
I walked along the beach a few days ago a quarter mile landward of the San Andreas fault zone. Surfers were swimming out and riding the curls back on the west side of San Francisco. Sets picked them up over the Pacific Plate and swept them onto North America. A hundred feet below, the […]
I have what might best be classified as ‘manic costume joy.’ You’ve even heard about it here on this blog. I try to be the scariest thing I can think of for Halloween. One year, that was “Your Biological Clock.” Another year, the year humans hit 7 billion in number on October 31st, I tried […]
Last Wednesday, I was driving with a couple of friends. We turned onto a road that runs along the lakeshore and gasped. An enormous orange moon hung low over the lake, the bottom rim nearly kissing the water. It looked impossible. “I wish we could pull over,” one of my passengers said. I swerved into […]
If you’re familiar with the internet, you know there’s a problem with the word “actually”. After initially gaining recognition in 2012 as “the worst word on the planet”, it quickly rose to an unpopularity stratospheric enough to justify think pieces in The New Republic and The Atlantic. Its ill repute transcends the English language: last year, […]
I’m generally skeptical of the vast majority of things labeled as “self care” these days. Plenty of people have written about this, about how “self care” has become overrun with basic consumerism and aesthetically engineered Instagram posts rather than, you know, actually stuff that helps you care for yourself. So recently, when the The New […]
Evolution, we are often reminded, conducts itself at a glacial pace. It throws its dice and picks its favorites over thousands of generations—plenty of time, we wearily explain, for a functional eye to develop. By the same slow token, this process, life’s old standby for adapting to new environments, will not be fast enough […]
