Studying glaciers has taught science about the Earth’s age and natural cycles. So what does the death of one California glacier tell us about our future?
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Posted inStory
High Expectations: LSD, T.C. Boyle’s Women, and Me
“Outside Looking In” dramatizes the discovery of LSD and the cult of personality surrounding Timothy Leary. Our reviewer drops acid and thinks about how, for women, it can be safer to be a downer.
Posted inHighlight, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes, Science & Nature
The Vital and Surprising Role of Driftwood
Driftwood provides the necessary habitat and shelter that feeds a raft of marine life all the way up the food chain.
Posted inHighlight, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes, Science & Nature
A Race to Claim a Piece of Space: The Out-of-This World Obsession of Meteorite Hunters
Meteorite hunters Mike Farmer and Robert Ward travel to Carancas, a tiny village at 12,000 feet in Peru’s remote altiplano, to examine a crater in the hope to claim precious rock from space.
Posted inNonfiction
Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail
During a month hiking Muir’s “Range of Light,” three young women traversed snowy mountain passes, ran out of food, confronted a gendered wilderness, and learned to deal with each other.
Posted inBooks, Culture, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, Story
The Politics of UFOs
In the past few years the world of UFO “researchers” has been afflicted by the kinds of conspiratorial cracks that have appeared throughout American culture: Who can be trusted?
Posted inEditor's Pick
This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out
The climate is changing. It will change our world irrevocably. If the scale of the change is too staggering, maybe we need something in addition to science: “But artists can register scale. They can transpose the fact of melting ice to inundated homes and bewildered lives, gauge it against long history and lost future.”
Posted inCrime, Quotes
When Forensic “Science” Is Anything But
Despite what “Law & Order: CSI” tells us, blood spatter patterns don’t necessarily hold all the keys to a crime scene.
Posted inCulture, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes, Science & Nature
When the Climate Change Story Becomes Your Life Story
Moving from bustling, expensive Seattle to tiny Ashland, Oregon seemed like an improvement, until the forest fire season began.
Posted inArts & Culture, History, Science & Nature, Story
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Pearls
Born from irritation and intrusion, luminous and complex, surprisingly durable: pearls are rich with symbolism and saturated with pain.
