Why are quiet cars reserved for trains?

Where do you go to read? There’s probably a chair or couch in your home where you read, but I’m talking about when you go somewhere to read. Out of personal preference or because homes can be chaotic or lonely, is there somewhere you go? I’ve keenly felt the loss of a place to read […]

Sci Fi lives on in the people it created

What’s something you used to love but have lost your feeling for? For me, in a world that looks a lot like science fiction, I have trouble with the speculative novels I used to love. I’ve suspended my disbelief already, even in real life, and I shrug at the magic imagined in these stories. This […]

Coming of age

When I was 16, I went off to be a kayaking instructor at a Boy Scouts camp in Ontario called Opemikon. The camper population was divided into little kids and big kids, and I was the only girl on staff watching the big kids, so I got my own platform tent whereas everyone else had […]

Redux: A Photo By Any Other Name

This post originally appeared in 2012, before advances in artificial intelligence brought the possibility of deep fakes and other ways for storytelling artifacts to lie. Here I looked at the ways in which information can be false, and how we typically only look or check for certain kinds of veracity. Ever since reading the comment […]

Redux: Places of Worship

This post originally ran in November of 2011. The universality of science – an obligation to produce identical results no matter the setting – removes a certain sense of place from science history. What does it matter where mitosis was first understood, if it could just as well be discovered anywhere in the biosphere? Furthermore, […]

Redux: La Vie Souterraine

“The year is 1994. We are all living underground.” So begins a 1960s movie my friends and I howled about in the year 1996, watching a large cast of extras in metallic bell-bottoms surging purposefully through tunnels. I am re-posting this post from seven years ago because I can’t remember writing it. I absorbed not […]

‘Twas the ning before Christmas

It is a Gamble tradition that each child can select one present to open on Christmas Eve, ahead of the Christmas Day onslaught. On a nature ramble yesterday with my father and me, my son asked if he could open his when we got back to the house, around 2pm. “Christmas Eve,” says I. “The […]

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

I’ve always been fascinated by tales of postal heroism. Not the manufactured goodwill of a reply program for letters to Santa Claus, but the everyday challenge of figuring out what a sender intended and getting the letter into the right hands. It’s become a bit of a sport for snail-mail loving citizens, and the postal […]