Last month, a pair of University of Michigan scientists published a study that shows that people who date online tend to pursue mates 25 percent more desirable than themselves. I find this difficult to believe. My experience with online dating suggests that the best strategy is to pursue the people who seem the most *interesting*. […]
Welcome to Snark Week 2018! There was one thing I was certain of: My toes were not polychaetes. They were not mollusks. They were not fish, nor were they squid. They were me. But there was one thing the giant petrel was equally certain of: My toes were meat. The seabird was approximately the […]
This post originally appeared June 14, 2017 You know those sounds that slip across the senses until they settle, in the brain, on an association entirely unrelated to their maker? Those sounds that seem to almost synesthetically transform one thing into another? The way noise can be brilliant, or color evokes flavor, or a smell […]
Last year, I went to an island in the middle of the Bering Sea to count nesting birds. Most of the nests failed, possibly due to elevated ocean temperatures. A couple of weeks ago, one of the techs on the island called to tell me that this year is shaping up to be the same […]
This post originally appeared June 21, 2017 One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall health of the planet. The Arctic, for example, is regarded as a bellwether for the catastrophes of climate […]
The Atacama Desert is country that wears quiet like a skin. Stretching through the top 600 miles of Chile, it is so spare of all save earth and rock that it calls to mind bone stripped of flesh by sun, wind, teeth. It is a place that makes you understand why the painter Georgia O’Keeffe […]
My November, December and January were a blur of travel for family and story and art. Maine. Utah. Colorado. Tennessee. Chile. Now, I’m in the thick of a long stretch of what might be best described as Desk Time. Neighborhood walk time. Hours of staring out the window, there but not there at all. All […]
When I lived in a small town in Colorado, I knew a woman who most people would describe as a hoarder. She made her home in a log cabin not far from a winding river, under ragged cottonwood trees that shed downy tufts in early summer, and showers of gold each autumn. You could see […]