When I was a kid, I pretended I was a bird, and I did it in front of anyone in early elementary school, winging around with my arms outstretched. Around fourth grade I started learning modesty and only soared when no one was watching. The ground, I imagined, was far away, ants the size of […]
Miscellaneous
The purity of the unchanged treble loomed large in my English childhood. It might been something to do with the 500-year-old tradition of May Morning, seen here in the earliest known recording. At the tolling of six in the morning, Oxford’s townspeople gather on the street to hear the Magdalen College choir sing Hymnus Eucharisticus […]
Tomorrow, I fly down to the Magellanic penguin colony at Punta Tombo, Argentina, to apply some small tracking tags to penguins before they set off on their journeys north. I wrote this post a few years ago at the end of the same sort of trip, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing the […]
I am an American citizen, and I don’t look like someone you would stop if you were on the street trying to harass immigrants, but I wasn’t born here. (I’m not an immigrant, either – I just happen to have been born overseas.) I’ve spent about 15% of my life in other countries. And my […]
I had the honor of chatting with my friend, colleague from Nat Geo magazine, and fellow LWON contributor Neil Shea, whose first book, Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic, is now out there in the world! It’s a lovely book. In it, Neil journeys through the Arctic seeking out […]
I’ve been in southern Baja reading Ann Finkbeiner’s accounts of the dismal cold of midwinter and I’ve felt bad. I know what it’s like to shiver in the gray, but Baja happened for me, Sonoran Desert splendor (my home desert), along the whale-happy Sea of Cortez, (the first giant body of salt water I ever […]
There is an Asian elm tree that I can see out of my office window. In the winter, its branches trace intricate lines against the pale sky. Every few years, an arborist casts ropes through the branches and climbs up to trim the tree. One year, he pointed out a fork in the trunk with […]
This post originally appeared six years ago, before AI further challenged the societal value assigned to personal erudition. But Leonardo remains a guiding light for me, as for so many others. The daily to-do lists and life of Leonardo Da Vinci have much to teach a science communicator like me.
