Since I wrote this post a few months ago, the beloved books mentioned here have been joined on our shelves by Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 (the brand-new and very worthy sequel to Rebel Girls, described below) and Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World. Now, after this year of extraordinary […]
My alma mater is, for better or worse, the undergraduate equivalent of a cult film: Most people have never heard of Reed College, and the few who have really like to argue about it. So it’s disconcerting when arguments usually confined to the Reed campus attract national attention. In recent days, a Washington Post column […]
This week, news of the rediscovery of the Jackson’s climbing salamander in Guatemala has me thinking about all the species that lie just out of sight. Here’s one I first wrote about in 2013. Late last year, during a reporting trip in Cambodia, I shared a car for a couple of days with Simon Mahood, […]
Last spring, I wrote a story about the origin and evolution of “endling,” a word used to describe the sole surviving member of a species. Endling was coined in the mid-1990s by Robert Webster, a Georgia doctor who, during his work at a convalescent center, realized that there was no precise English word for a […]
The first pages of children’s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn describe eleven-year-old Francie Nolan sitting on her Brooklyn fire escape, daydreaming that she lives in a tree. For Francie, it wasn’t hard to imagine; tree limbs curled gracefully around the fire escape, shading her from the summer sun with umbrellas of pointed leaves. The tree […]
This post was first published in March of last year; sadly, it’s more relevant than ever. On February 29, after having lunch in Hood River, Oregon, Kozen Sampson drove to a quiet neighborhood to take his dogs for a walk. He was getting out of his car, he says, when a man with brown hair approached and kicked his car door. […]
Those of us who try to communicate complicated things for a living are usually told, early on by some wiser person, to know our audiences. To know our readers, in my case. I’ve always taken this pretty seriously—which is to say, I take all of you seriously. I don’t know your names (except for Mom—hi, […]
Like Ann, I’m a recent convert to the charm of crows. This has led to a running joke with my husband’s cousin, Roger. At family reunions, I tell him how much I like crows. He tells me how much he likes to shoot them. Hilarious, right? Here’s the satisfying part: Crows remember Roger. They don’t just remember Roger’s […]