The Last Word

September 10-14, 2018 Sarah starts off the week with a Tinder stand-in: a 1972 guide to the outdoors at night.  The challenge is identifying just which kind of nocturnal creature you are encountering’ This may not be the same kind of creature you thought you had swiped right on. . . If he’s wearing a […]

The Last Word

August 20-24, 2018 Remember last year when, for a moment, we took a break from earthly concerns and looked up at the sky? Helen returns to her eclipse post from last year, written from the backseat of a car during the I-95 traffic jam. The sun’s last rays shone bright, then winked out, and there […]

The Last Word

May 14-18, 2018 To start the week, Emma has some good news: butterflies are adapting more nimbly to the Anthropocene that some might have thought. This happy ending surprised the researchers. “Our mindset in 2014 was simply to reconfirm the extinction, and we were very surprised to find larvae,” they write. To be fair, ecologists […]

The Last Word

April 23-27, 2018 Rose starts the week gathering some ideas on creativity, like so many eels. How does one catch eels? Bare handed? Do I design myself some gloves? Or some kind of hunting stick, or camera trap? Maybe I should sing to the eels, to make them feel safe. I need to become an […]

The Last Word

April 16-20 For much of the country, spring warmth is too long in coming this year. Much too long. But we are well past the equinox and the days are getting longer, and that means the running and buzzing and frolicking is under way. Some of the heightened activity means animals are getting busy, Ann […]

The Last Word

March 19-23, 2018 Sarah knows so many lovely words, and on Monday, writes about learning even more. When they talked among themselves, they spoke exclusively in Chilean Spanish, which, one of them—Fernando—gravely informed me, is even worse for outsiders than Argentine Spanish. I was awash in a sea of musical sounds whose meanings I could only grasp at […]

The Last Word

February 12-16, 2018 The Tesla/SpaceX launch left Rebecca exhilarated—but she knows not everyone felt the same way. Plenty of people didn’t like it because they argue we have enough to deal with here on Earth. Some people were unhappy because they don’t like Elon Musk, who owns the rocket and the car. And some people […]

The Last Word

January 22-26, 2018 Emma has sage advice for ditching your phone, which may be one of many things that’s making you miserable. Give your phone to your children and ask them to hide it. A fun game for the whole family! Tell them they can’t tell you where it is, even if you start to […]