This first ran on Sept. 6, 2012. My nephew was then a biology graduate student; he is now a fully-functioning scientist. He is confident, self-collected, easy to talk to, curious — in short, he made it through his education in one piece. But the education itself has not changed — not the advice, not the […]
Miscellaneous
My teenage kid is driving, and six feet tall. His feet are bigger than mine. On the way to school we come down a frozen dirt road, him behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat when a rear tire blows. It flops like a seal and he pulls over. The road is a […]
When I lived in a small town in Colorado, I knew a woman who most people would describe as a hoarder. She made her home in a log cabin not far from a winding river, under ragged cottonwood trees that shed downy tufts in early summer, and showers of gold each autumn. You could see […]
There were many times when it wasn’t lice. It wasn’t lice that time a neighbor’s kids had lice, and all of our heads started feeling itchy. It wasn’t lice when the preschool had a lice outbreak. It wasn’t lice when our good friends had lice three times in a row. It wasn’t lice when we […]
This post originally ran in June 2018. (I still have the sunglasses.) I’ve been telling myself for a couple of years now that, when my sunglasses turned 20, they were getting their own blog post. Well, that’s sometime around now–my records aren’t too good, but it was definitely 1998 and almost definitely June–so here you […]
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 […]
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 […]
