The Last Word On Nothing

February 29 – March 4, 2016

This week, Helen and her friends became famous using nothing but some marshmallows and an idea. Here’s the blow-by-blow of her brush with celebrity.

Craig reports from the Bering Strait where, as ever, he walks in two overlaid landscapes, separated by thousands of years.

Rose has a fantasy life in a town she’s never been to – one that shares her last name. Should she dare to go and face the reality?

Michelle follows developments at Project Puffin, which not only restores the range of seabirds in Maine but provides valuable insights into their marine environment.

My ancestors, the Holland Brothers, brought the first motion pictures to North America. And little old Ottawa was in the middle of it all.

Image: Shutterstock

Blacksmith Scene (1893), thought to be the first staged narrative in film

Last summer, after a decade in Canada’s Northwest Territories, I moved south to Ottawa. It is a city that holds deeper roots for me the longer I dig. Every day, I pass the park where my high school friends used to hang, and I pick up my son from an after-school program in the church where my parents were married.

Here, the experimental farm where my mother had her first summer job, picking strawberries. There, the yellow thing that has usurped the lot of my grandparents’ house. Its windowpanes have prominent Xs instead of + shapes. (Actually, maybe I like it.) We play at the beach in Britannia Bay, where my great-great-uncle drowned in a sailboat accident. His body was never recovered, so presumably he’s still there.

But there are clear familial voices from still further back – ones that blend with the ghost of another city in the same place. It wasn’t Ottawa in the early 1800s when my four-times-great-grandfather arrived from Montreal – it was a timber hub called Bytown, and Confederation was yet to bring Canada into being. Continue reading →

Feb. 22 – 26, 2016

RadioLab doesn’t run climate change stories. Cassie asks her husband, who works for RadioLab, why not.  Cassie’s husband explains about anti-stories.  Cassie says, “what the hell.”

Jennifer was out in the rain and cold, and was on the receiving end of kindness and empathy.  She doesn’t care whether her kind empathizer was just making him/herself feel good.  “Good begets good,” she says.  “It doesn’t matter why.”

Helen set up her easel in front of Rubens’ Daniel in the Lion’s Den so she could copy some lions.  What she ended up with was “Daniela with her blue martini, her pet lion, and the skull of the last man who tried to mess with her.”

Cameron considers a cartoon called the Octonauts, some citizen science called JellyWatch, thinks the octopi and jellies all inhabit a quiet world, and wonders, “What could go wrong?”

Sarah tries to love ticks, a journey that takes her through John Mayer, the U.S. National Tick Collection, and a clearly-crazed entomologist.