This post originally ran in March 2014. Although tuberculosis cases are on the decline in the United States, we’re not headed for elimination, at least not this century. There were more than 9,000 cases in 2018, mostly among foreign-born individuals. But the news isn’t all bad: In August, the Food and Drug Administration approved a […]
Miscellaneous
This story first ran January 17, 2019. It’s about a quark. Any resemblance to the author is purely coincidental. In fact, any perceived real-world parallels reflect more on the reader’s personal issues than the writer’s, don’t you think? You know what, stop judging me. It’s been a rough couple billion years. I don’t know why, […]
Squirrels are comforted by birds’ easy chit-chat, new research tells us. Biologists already knew the scurrying rodents tuned into birds’ alarm calls, but they didn’t realize that the mammals responded to songs about the good times, too. Content chirps suggest to squirrels that all is well. To me, too. At this time of year especially […]
“Twitter is a sewer,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens last week in one of the many skirmishes that have now coalesced into the phenomenon known as Bedbug-gate. The ongoing saga is quite beyond the remit of this blog (though we do a brisk trade in actual bedbugs). But I’ll take Stephens’ sewer […]
My fish died last week. I am not sure how long he lay on the bottom of his aquarium before I noticed. It wouldn’t have been more than a day, because I’d checked on him the previous afternoon. He wasn’t looking good, unmoving except for his gills, which seemed to be straining. But then Percy […]
Earlier this summer, as I lay with my head on my boyfriend’s chest, I heard something odd. His heart — an efficient athlete’s organ that normally thumps fewer than 50 times per minute at rest— switched from its reassuring, steady bah-buhm, bah-buhm, bah-buhm to rapid staccato: bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah. I lifted my head and asked if he’d noticed it. Pete […]
Yesterday was National Dog Day, so I thought it only appropriate to repost this story about my dog and her insatiable appetite. She’s five now, and still insatiable. Perhaps there was a time when our dog, Bea, didn’t eat everything. If so, I don’t remember it. At first, we thought it might be a puppy […]
