For reasons I didn’t fully understand myself (marriage? the cat? surely someone or something else was to blame), I was feeling more than usually lazy, or maybe just unwilling to tolerate the discomfort of writing. It felt like a dangerous malaise, and the only remedy I could think of was to try to soak up some […]
Month: November 2023
I go to a lot of natural history museums. Something about all those pretty rocks and dead animals, and the chance that I might see something I’ve never seen before or learn something new—I can’t resist it. In the last three years, I’ve been to at least 15 natural history museums on two continents. Here’s […]
These thoughts on sneezing first ran back in October 2015, and I loved the responses. Feel free to share more examples of achoo styles from friends and family! It’s always a good time for a robust sneeze. —— When we were kids, my brother was the sneezer of all sneezers. There was never just one, […]
Earlier this fall, I had the privilege of profiling the anthropologist and photographer Amanda Stronza, who shoots sensitive portraits of roadkill and thus restores the beauty and dignity of the wild creatures that our vehicles obliterate. Amanda’s work reveals a fundamental paradox of roadkill, one that I also explore at some length in my book: […]
I’ve been interviewing an archeologist who’s famous for “sticking close to the data,” that is, not saying anything he can’t back with actual evidence. Reminding me of what I learned in my first year as a junior high school teacher: don’t make threats you can’t carry out, and that’s not as much a digression as […]
I arrived under a cloud. The arrival was at Punta Tombo, a colony of Magellanic penguins on the coast of Argentina. It was the 2nd of October. Hundreds of thousands of penguins, most of them males, had been coming ashore for about two weeks, marking the start of the breeding season. While they waited for […]
It’s fall, otherwise known as the beginning of cold and flu season. So what better time to revisit the potential hazards of manual nasal aspiration? I first wrote this in 2018. These days I use an automatic aspirator. No mouth suction required! Three weeks ago I came down with the flu. I was sicker than […]
Around 2011, there was a lot of chatter about an algorithm supposedly so scary Google wouldn’t release it. It would allegedly help you find people just from snapping images of their face. As with so much of today’s reality, what was a cool and spooky ghost story in 2011 has become just another intrusive and […]