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Guest Post: Science Education
My work has become opening digital files to search for signs of life. The biggest thing I do, the midday ritual of checking emails. Refresh, refresh. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! I’m a saint. I...
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Guest Post: A Donation from the Heart, and the Bladder
Wald carrying some of her donated urine. When I was a few weeks pregnant, I met a new friend, who is an expert in sanitation for low-resource contexts, for coffee in The Hague, where I live. I hadn’t...
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Guest Post: Part-Time Vegetarians
I. We’ve been slowly cutting back on meat. It’s better for us and better for the planet. Not to mention the exploited workers on the factory farms—did you see that John Oliver segment? After it came...
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Learning to Think Like a Scout
I first met Julia Galef while reporting a story about rational thinking for Discover Magazine back in 2014. Galef is co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, which she was directing at the...
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Guest Post: The Whimbrel
They were dark forms scattered up and down the beach. One here, three there, a pair just beyond them. Their larger size distinguished them from the other shorebirds, drawing our attention. “What are...
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Guest post: Becoming People on the Playground: Observations of Young Humans...
The author’s son (yellow shirt) leaving the playground with a friend, previously a blue guy. ABSTRACT What is it about watching kids be kids that is so fascinating? That makes us snap too many photos...
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Our Herd
We first saw the elk in September. Our route to the Wilder forest passed the Yaquina Bay, and there, between the road and mudflats, was an antler rack we initially mistook for a willow tree. Our...
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Guest Post: the Vastness of a Chord
Deep Note, which made its debut on May 25th, 1983, at the premiere of Return of the Jedi, is a 30-second tour de force of electronic music. It would play in those few minutes of darkness before the...
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Guest Post: My Other Pandemic
I could tell you the fentanyl statistics – that in one year 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, 28% more than the year before, and that 80% of those deaths were linked to fentanyl, a synthetic...
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Guest Post: Flexible Flying
In recent months, I’ve spent most of my time in Bremen, a coastal fishing village just down the peninsula from Damariscotta, Maine. Often my husband joins me. Bremen is Maine the way you think of...
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Guest Post: Permanent Impermanence
Like many poets, indeed many artists of all media, I am strongly drawn to nature, both as a source of imagery and a provoker of emotion. In our time of degraded nature, poisoned and choked bodies of...
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Guest post: Writing types as the Bristol stool scale
Are you suffering from writer’s block? Or do your words flow a little too freely? The color, frequency and density of your writing can tell you a lot about your health! Luckily, doctors have developed...
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Guest Post: Poet yells at newspaper article
In late October, The New York Times published a splashy feature article by opinion writer Bret Stephens titled “Yes, Greenland’s ice is melting, but…”. In this 6,000-word piece inspired by a trip to...
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Guest Post: Berlin Boar Pheromones
The wild boars of Berlin get a bad rap. Last week one of these beasts was mistaken for a lioness, triggering emergency alerts and a two-day armed search. During the pandemic, another boar stole the...
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Guest Post: A Glimmer of Good in a Time of War
On the night of January 8, 1970, I was an A-37 attack jet pilot returning to my home base of Bien Hoa after a mission over the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. It was 1:30am as I reduced the power to separate...
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Guest post: A plunge into the artificial sweat industry
A reporter and her artificial sweat. Some time ago I purchased a tiny bottle of synthetic sweat from a reputable chemical company for $141. The bottle of “Artificial Eccrine Perspiration – Stabilized”...
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Guest Post: I Went Searching for Rattlesnakes and the Most Dangerous Thing I...
In the early days of the pandemic, I found myself faced with a test of courage even more daunting than disinfecting groceries: peeing in the woods as a woman, and a very pregnant one, at that. As part...
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Guest Post: A Killer Whale by Any Other Name
Last month, scientists described two new species of killer whales, and the community of cetacean researchers and advocates online immediately erupted in the Internet equivalent of excited squeaks,...
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Guest Post: Where Do Cicadas Go When They Die?
The cicadas started scaling dense soil while I was in another state, hundreds of miles away from home, a hundred times farther than they’d ever travel. I returned to hollow husks, split along the back...
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Guest Post: Why Ice Speaks Slowly
The first time I landed on the Siple Coast of West Antarctica, I immediately felt disoriented. The landscape was a monotonous flat white, with wind-scoured snow and ice extending to identical horizons...
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