Of Time and Turtles

On Tuesday two people who I met a few years ago posted similar pictures. One still lives in the town of Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, where I briefly lived; the other, last I heard, had moved even farther north, to somewhere in the Norwegian wilds. Each posted a picture showing the […]

On the Menu

A local restaurant reviewer has a monthly feature in which he lists openings and closings of eateries around town. The list only contains the restaurants’ names and addresses, which always seems especially stark when it comes to the places that have shut their doors. It’s the culinary equivalent of a gravestone. There’s nothing about the buckwheat crepe […]

Mare Incognitum

This week, a great white shark named Lydia may be the first white shark seen crossing into the eastern Atlantic. Scientists tagged her a year ago in Florida; since then, she’s swum 19,000 miles and as of yesterday morning, she was about 1000 miles from the Irish coast. White shark populations, along with those of […]

Guest Post: the Nature of Octopuses

There is an old story about a scorpion and a turtle. Variants abound, but the basic tale revolves around an unusually talkative scorpion that asks a turtle for a lift across a river. The turtle refuses at first, fearing the scorpion’s sudden but inevitable betrayal. The scorpion insists, the turtle relents, and the two get […]