Feral daffodils

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud  by William Wordsworth   I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.   Continuous as the stars that […]

The Last Word

March 19-23, 2018 Sarah knows so many lovely words, and on Monday, writes about learning even more. When they talked among themselves, they spoke exclusively in Chilean Spanish, which, one of them—Fernando—gravely informed me, is even worse for outsiders than Argentine Spanish. I was awash in a sea of musical sounds whose meanings I could only grasp at […]

When Friendship was Different

Within the last three years, two of my closer university friends have died. I moved away from Toronto a decade ago, and with those moves I was less frequently in touch with my college friends, but I always assumed we could go on picking up where we left off whenever I was in town. In […]

Redux: The secret placebo experiment we call homeopathy

Beginning in April, the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine will no longer be able to provide patients with homeopathic remedies funded by the UK’s taxpayers. This is part of a larger UK crackdown on homeopathy that has gotten underway over the past 18 months. Late in 2016, homeopathy was banned in one of the country’s […]

Finding the words

Most of us probably remember the first word we spoke in our native language. Mine was “Cat,” for I was fascinated by the ornery old Siamese that my parents kept when I was a baby. From there, I’m sure, I learned a child’s standard repertoire: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Doggie,” the colors red-yellow-green-blue, and those most basic […]

The Last Word

March 12 – 16, 2018 Raise your kids to ask questions and they do.  Lots of questions.  Many many questions, many of which require you to decide something.  Emma lists every question and you could get tired just reading them.  Commenters also frazzled. Michelle find a guy who sonifies weather data.  That is, he takes […]

A Vocabulary for the Almost-Disappeared

“Look, our snowman is still there,” I said Monday morning. “Oh!” my daughter said. “It is! Mommy, will it be there for all the times?” I picked her up. “No, it won’t,” I said. “I think it will melt. Remember how we talked about snow melting?” “Oh,” my 3-year-old said. “Okay.” Her disappointment was audible. I […]

Redux: In Defense of the Antivaxxer

This story ran last year after an especially turbulent trip to the pediatrician. It has since appeared in a different form on the NPR Shots blog. I am a man of science. Okay, perhaps not of science, but certainly near it. I’m science adjacent. But regardless, I consider myself to be bound, in the end, by logic […]