If there’s any animal that could use a new PR agency, it’s got to be the electric eel. I mean, think about it – what other animal doesn’t even have its own correct name? You’ve probably heard that an electric “eel” is no eel at all but rather a fish (a knifefish, to be exact). From this […]
Miscellaneous
At a biological field station in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona — towering canyons and clear-running creeks — a Stanford scientist attending a poetry workshop volunteered to get up for an evening reading. He’d spent the week studying with poet Sherwin Bitsui in an environmental writing program put on by Orion magazine, using specimen […]
Some things are sisters, if you know how to look at them like a wildfire sun and a new penny like snowy boughs and salamander feet
A few months ago, I visited the Pasteur Institute, a research center in Paris dedicated to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. The trip included a tour of the apartment and crypt of Louis Pasteur, the 19th century French chemist and microbiologist who developed vaccines against rabies and anthrax. My favorite part of the […]
I first wrote about our old, scared dog five years ago in the summer. He’d had a hard life before he got to us, and as he got older, he seemed to get more and more anxious. Last month while we were traveling, we got a call from our dear vet that it was time. […]
The inevitable knock came one afternoon this September — the tail of Spokane summer, the season of drought and grasshoppers. My landlord stood on the stoop, placid and patient as a mountain lion, shiny black SUV idling in my — his — driveway. How’s it going? I asked, attempting nonchalance. He took off his sunglasses. […]
Sometime in the 1920s, somewhere in France. A young girl from an influential middle-class French family had been found in a field, stabbed to death. There was no obvious perpetrator. The police rounded up the usual suspects – which is to say, immigrants – and found a Jewish door-to-door salesman who had been in the […]
A couple of months ago, my husband and I drove into the Sonoran desert. We were in pursuit of the weird, heading for a mountain celebrating God’s love and constructed almost entirely out of latex paint. We left Palm Springs and drove south toward the Salton Sea.