Through Rain, Wind, and Ice

… as mice and voles tunnel under the snow where the temperatures are relatively balmy and they can access the plants they feed on. These animals are at the bottom of the winter food chain, turning vegetation buried deep under the snow into furry calories on which fox, coyote, lynx, and other animals depend. When …

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Letter from the Aral Sea: All Dried Up

… better, they are surely improving. The sea’s diameter is now 100 kilometers. It’s not much compared to what it was, but it will at least feed us.”
Fish caught in the sea once supplied three processing plants around Aral and fed Soviets across the land. Now, freezer trucks mostly head straight for profitable …

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The Eleventh

… as human beings.
Make the Eleventh a day when every newspaper and magazine and website and pundit and commentator and radio station and television station and Twitter feed makes a point of noting that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful people who just want to get by and have jobs and raise their kids …

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The Well Curve

… along the same stretch of California shore, pelicans and about 400 sea lions succumbed to a mysterious stultification, abandoning their orderly behavior and losing the ability to feed and swim. They too had become stupid en masse.
People are not immune to these strange reactions. In 1987, more than 100 Canadians developed similar symptoms after …

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The Mysteries of Attraction

… a job—and sufficient on the face of it, yet when loveless we do seek more.
Pets, for example, beyond a packhorse or watchdog. A pet to feed and hug, perhaps to sleep beside. An aged neighbor to assist without recompense in the manner of the Golden Rule. Or we’ll obsess over a hobby …

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Clash on Neutral Ground

… fait accompli, thank you for your interest, now go away.
Given all the clamor, the planning process for the new avenue may be reopened. (A deadline for feedback to the Army Corps of Engineers had been this week.) Which points up another citywide change since the storm: the rise of neighborhood and community activism may …

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Josie Glausiusz

… Primate Tricks?
Tough as Old Moss
Ode on a Grecian Replica
New Insight on a Famous Study
Thanks for the Gratitude
Another Tobacco Toll
The Care and Feeding of Prince George
The Luxury of a Toilet
Strange Science
Feeling Hormonal
Physicist, Pacifist, Anti-Fascist
The Shocking Truth
Following Combat and Civilian Traumas
Selfie Defense
Autism …

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The Examined Lie

… a story that holds together, sticks, and captures us with its power. For the storyteller at least, the latter impulse not only overtakes the former, it also feeds off itself, ensuring that, as Williams’s favorable ratings increased, so did the pressure to make an old story more compelling than the previous version.
Telling a …

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N Judah

… case maybe it was. The faculty talked him up in galleries, awarded him prizes; when they jetted off to New York or Rotterdam, they left him the keys to their Craftsman-style bungalows up in the hills. All he had to do was feed the cats and take in the mail, and he rarely …

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Saigon Summer

… looking after them for the last few days before they were sent off in an airplane, to accustom them a little bit to English, or simply to feed them before they departed. I’ve never seen women so delighted. The children were adorable, no matter how handicapped or fussy or skinny, and the embassy wives …

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