Jessa Gamble is embedded in an experimental evolution lab at the University of Ottawa. Hope Jahren writes that you can hear corn growing in the Midwest. It sounds like the collective rustle of husks adjusting to accommodate the day’s inch of growth. I am tempted to put a microphone in the incubator. Would my bacteria […]
Miscellaneous
A friend, author Ginger Strand, recently took this picture of a handprint I spray-painted on a wall in Manhattan. When I put it up a few years ago, the wall was blank, and she wanted me to know that graffiti has bloomed around it, along with this sweet little cluster of stars somebody put […]
It has been said that penguins appear to be wearing tuxedos—crisp and elegant in their blacks and whites. This is not so of Humboldt penguins. If Humboldt penguins are wearing tuxedos, then they have been wearing them to jump trains for a couple of weeks, sleeping atop coal slag or down in the dingy corners […]
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, […]
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 […]
