Fragmented sleep might not be restful, but I love it, because I can finally remember what I dreamt. The stories play like movies, colors saturated, plots full of twists. Some are spun from trivia; others are Hitchcockian, suspenseful and complex. Who writes these scripts? Who does that weird and…
Language has allowed us to be bound together by codes of law; to move easily between past and present and future; to fathom the deepest mysteries of the universe. But while scholars were busy defending our species’ superiority, biologists were uncovering mysteries of animal communication that shot down one “special” human capacity after another.
Something dark and sharp must live deep inside me, because when I read “There Are No Psychopaths,” I am disappointed.
Psychopaths explain so much. The twisted little smile that crosses someone’s face, quickly hidden, after they cause pain. The impulse, spreading fast these days, to watch the…
When I asked for a curator at the Saint Louis Zoo who would educate me about animal communication, I was hoping for chatty, irreverent primates or soulful, wise elephants. Instead, I was sent to Dr. Ed Spevak, the zoo’s acclaimed curator of invertebrates.
Brilliant, fired with enthusiasm for…
It was all so amusing when it happened to other people. To old people. Such fun to say dryly, when one’s parent scrambled, frantic, to find their glasses, “They’re on your nose.”
But the other day, I was the one hunting for the glasses on my nose. Granted,…
ADHD, sleep deprivation, amphetamines and the truth of why they work.
Another fluffy news release about home interiors. I move to delete it—but the backstory catches me. An interior designer who had to tear apart her own home because her toddler was struggling to breathe? She wound up a certified expert in home wellness…
Snow fell with the confidence of something that knew it would be felt. Streets emptied. Sound dulled. The city became a held breath between east and west, a place where movement slowed because it had to. There was nothing especially dramatic about this at first. Just cold. Just accumulation.
We live in a sensory desert in which rooms are deodorized, soundproofed, and painted in neutral colors. But “sensehacking" can transform experience.
More than ten thousand species are now critically endangered. Humans have clear-cut forests, paved grassland, overharvested, overfished, and overhunted. Much of the existing ground is being strangled by honeysuckle, kudzu, vetch, cheatgrass, and various exotics. Can we get a second chance?