Arizona winter night, stars over pines, my buddy and I were heading for a hot tub on the outskirts of Flagstaff when a phone rang. It was a mutual friend, Jayme Dittmar, a dog musher on a 1,300-mile expedition by dog sled from Nome, Alaska, to the village of Utqiagvik on Point Barrow. She was […]
Miscellaneous
“Freak.” “Monster.” “Gorilla.” During this year’s Super Bowl Sunday, Shakira and J-Lo were not the only hyperboles on show. Both the official sports commentary and its online counterparts were littered with back-handed terms of admiration tinged with disgust. Why is it, I wondered, that these off-putting words are preferred over unambiguous compliments like ‘exceptional athlete’ […]
In the early 1930s, Britain found itself at war. The “invading armies” were “vicious (and) destructive,” threatened “man’s dominion of the earth,” and seemed capable of propagating at almost supernatural speeds. Politicians denounced the assailants in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Scientists, called in to manage the unfolding debacle, prophesied utter […]
Look, nobody *likes* gluten-free food. It’s a necessary evil for some, and there’s a whole conversation about how many people actually need to be eating it. Which I am absolutely swerving here today! Instead, today I’m going to tell you about the scientists who were so desperate to create edible gluten-free baked goods that they […]
Under institutional lighting, the chopped chicken in BBQ sauce is like oily pet food on a doughy white bun, and its juice runs into the glistening orange fruit from a can and the scoop of too-sweet slaw that nobody ordered. The woman across the table, Linda, who has a Scottish accent and is a low […]
Tonight I contemplate this head of Romanesco broccoli, soon to be cut up, slathered in olive oil, and roasted. As you can see, its edible flowers, weirdly known as curds, form a pyramid of identical, spiraling turrets. It’s a classic example of fractal geometry: a shape that, like a fiddlehead fern or lightning bolt, can be broken down over and over again into smaller parts, each a […]
This happened the other day not far from where I live. Boulders fall all the time around here, highways regularly blocked. This time, the wording is what stuck. The local sheriff’s post went viral when this fallen obstacle was described as a “large boulder the size of a small boulder.” With those words, this 10,000-pound […]