This post first ran on June 12, 2018. The need to think about predation and empathy — equal but opposite responses to vulnerability — is alive and kicking. But the online magazine referred to at the end is dead. Early last week on Twitter, some National Security Agency posters showed up, reminding NSA employees to […]
Miscellaneous
Re-running this piece as a reminder for all of us to appreciate even our fowl-est friends. (See what I did there?) One of my favorite things about my usual writing beat (living things) is that we humans never stop learning new things about animals. We’re even still discovering species that are new to science. (Check […]
A former in-law came online a few days back to call me a troglodyte, and then a caveman. And not a nice way. I’m not averse to the title. I am a bearded, trunky fellow, strong legs and back. I can carry much weight through high passes and rocky canyons. I can’t recall the number […]
The TESS telescope is a shiny little thinking metal tube, drinking the light of 20 million stars in our cosmic neighborhood. It launched last year on a voyage to identify planets that look like this one—a miraculous feat, if it succeeds. Among the panoply of planets found so far, there is positively no place like […]
I’d just filled a wine bottle with Malbec and was handing it to a neighbor who was operating the manual corking machine when it occurred to me that wine making is a lot like book writing. I was at the tail end of a whirlwind tour to promote my new book, and I was home […]
First must have come listeningto the wind or regardingthe movements of animals,then monitoring the starsand sometime after thatscrutinizing fire;but somewhere in there belongswatching the progress of a river… Billy Collins, “The List of Ancient Pastimes” Most of the last couple weeks I’ve been sleeping on the ground. I stayed in southern Utah canyons long enough […]
I have what might best be classified as ‘manic costume joy.’ You’ve even heard about it here on this blog. I try to be the scariest thing I can think of for Halloween. One year, that was “Your Biological Clock.” Another year, the year humans hit 7 billion in number on October 31st, I tried […]
When we first moved into this house, we planted a fig tree in the backyard. It looked sad and scraggly for a long time—years, in fact. I would go over to the houses of friends who had fig trees in August, and these trees would be dripping with figs. I would ask how old the […]