Yesterday afternoon, all at once, my son and I started to feel a little sluggish. For me, a little afternoon slump isn’t so surprising. But for a kid who’s usually climbing up doorjambs, ripping off pull-ups, or teaching himself how to do a corkscrew flip on the trampoline, it’s weird. But there we were in […]
Miscellaneous
Since this was first published in August 17, 2012, Beth Willman’s galaxy has probably been identified as an ultra faint dwarf galaxy; it possibly has been found to hold a entity violent enough to send out xrays, which may or many not be a “low mass xray binary,” which may or may not be an […]
The round things in this picture of clear water aren’t rocks. They are little balls of algae tumbling around the bottom of the Adriatic sea off the Croatian coast. Occasionally they float to the surface of the water. Looking at these little balls is likely having a very different effect on you than it had […]
My dad died last year at age 94, his death a blessing for him and, while immensely sad, a relief for me. My grief felt over too soon, but I realized it was because I’d been grieving him for years. I looked back thinking about those so-called stages of grief we learned about in Psych […]
Last week, I crabbed over papers at a late-night kitchen table while my very pregnant step daughter stood near me with her hands clasped atop the globe of her belly. She’d been pacing for most of an hour, not wanting to sleep or sit down. She wanted her pelvis as open as she could make […]
In 1925, teacher Wilfred Eitzman found a cobble—a rock slightly bigger than a pebble, the weight of a small rat—in a cave in Northern Province, South Africa. It was reddish brown with an unmistakable, prominent face etched into it. Two deep and perfectly round eyes, a shallow divet for a nose, and grimacing, toothy mouth. […]
Last week I went sailing for the first time since I was a kid. It was a beautiful day, and I was out with my son and some friends, and they were learning to sail and I was watching them learn to sail and watching the harbor become a beautiful expanse of coastline as we […]