Search results for: feed
Elephant: Not an Elegy
… pride, the adults make a wall of themselves around the juveniles.
African elephants are a keystone species in relation to the African savannah. They travel for miles feeding, breaking up trees, and eating bark and leaves as well as grass. They keep grasslands open for themselves and for animals such as zebras, antelopes, and baboons …
Writing Addiction
… bang something out? Perhaps I just need to embrace my pathology and leave it at that.
But perhaps not, for I know that writing simultaneously assuages and feeds my anxiety. This column, for example, has me only mildly satisfied. I question whether I’ve done my subject justice. I fear my writing has been self …
My Kingdom for a Horse
… took place during the 1950s, the Age of the Tractor, but these neighbors worked their horses.)
Virginia was strong, powerful, and beautiful. She cost us zilch to feed. (One horse added to 100 cows costs nothing.) She came with her tack. Was she happy to be ours? Of a summer evening, we’d call to …
They Work Hard for their Honey
… nine muses. She invented dancing, presided over it, and danced to amuse her sister muses.)
In late spring or early summer, after new queens are made by feeding larvae royal jelly, bees are ready to swarm. Taking the old queen and leaving new queens to fight it out among themselves for the home nest, about …
Venus
We call it the morning star or the evening star or Earth’s twin. Twice a century the planet’s orbit passes directly between Earth and the Sun. This Transit of Venus occurred on June 5, 2012. In Seattle it rained. But even if you had to make do with the NASA feed, to witness …
Read MoreAnts in Your Pants
… colony might live in its plant and kill competing plants in the neighborhood by injecting formic acid into the competition’s vascular system. Another ant species might feed on herbaceous insects intending to dine on the ant plant. Still another species farms leaf-sucking scale insects. The scales feed on the plant, and the ants …
Read MoreCritical Tools and Theoretical Machines
… the guiding hand, is always unpredictable, always unique, and always bears the traces of the craftsperson. Machine-work—manufacture—is always predictable, uniform, and impersonal. You just feed the lumber into the mill. Tools extend the human; machines replace it. And that’s exactly what literary theory does: the work goes missing; the author, famously …
Read MoreDevil’s Bargain
… not do the work, her pass rate is low. This doesn’t sit well with the administration, and her merit raise suffers accordingly. But this problem also feeds into a more complex one, for it seems that many of her worst students—those likely to flunk—are also the most disruptive. They make it difficult …
Read MoreYes and No
… is very good at bringing people together. But it also inculcates a consumerist attitude to political activity. You walk down the aisle of your inbox or Twitter feed, saying yes to this, no to that. One thing after another, without a larger narrative or logical connection. It is as if the world’s problems consisted …
Read MoreGo Team!
… to both organisms, that it’s more than an alliance. It’s a merger. There are thousands of species of rumen microbes—protozoa, bacteria. archaea, fungi. They feed on grass or they feed on the feeders-on-grass. They need the cow’s anaerobic (lacking oxygen) stomach. They need the cow to survive and the …
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