June 26-29, 2017 Ann turns a line in the earth into a geologic haiku, feeling her way along the remains of a coastline 200 million years old. On one side of this line lies an “unholy cat’s breakfast of hard metamorphic rocks” and to the other is “boring clay and mud and sand that took […]
Miscellaneous
The internist I’ve been seeing my entire adult life recently retired. This essay, which originally appeared here in 2014, was not about her. But it did concern the sometimes—maybe always—precarious relationship between medical professional and medical naïf, one that I will now need to renegotiate with a new internist while bearing, believe me, this experience in […]
This post first ran on February 11, 2015. In 2011, Yoshihiro Kawaoka reported that his team had engineered a pandemic form of the bird flu virus. Bird flu, also known as H5N1, has infected infected nearly 700 people worldwide and killed more than 400. But it hasn’t yet gained the ability to jump easily from human to […]
June 19 – 23, 2017 “I imagine the zucchini plant at the end of the summer, lying back on the couch, an ice pack on its head, its eyes closed. Good work, I want to say to the zucchini. You made it.” Now, says Cameron, will somebody please take some of it please? Who besides […]
So, here’s a weird thing that happened. It began when I bought some new plants for my “garden” in Virginia. (I put “garden” in quotes because most of what grows in this spot are weeds, which I’ve taken to calling “native plants” to make myself feel less inept.) These were the kinds of plants […]
One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall health of the planet. The Arctic, for example, is regarded as a bellwether for the catastrophes of climate change that will soon afflict us all, […]
At dinner for my 18th birthday, one of my friends gave me one of those long, narrow posters filled with advice and inspiration that were popular at the time. I don’t have the poster in front of me, but there were things like this: Never wash a car, mow a lawn, or buy a Christmas […]
LWON happens. There’s no stopping us! Here’s what we gave our dear readers last week: Women speaking to groups get interrupted. A lot. Rose wrote up some advice on how to make sure, in a radio interview, that your girly voice is heard. Helen has seen U2 in concert 12 times, though she’s never marked […]
