Snapshot: Approaching fig season| The Last Word On Nothing
I’ve always wanted a crow friend, and this summer I’ve been making an effort. Each morning I put a handful of dog kibble on a paper plate and set it out on our back-patio table. I also ball up a piece of aluminum foil to add to the plate for decoration, although whether crows and other corvids (birds of the family Corvidae) actually like shiny objects, a common belief, remains to be proven. Then, I do my best rendition of a crow call (something between a caw and a honk, to my ear) to aler...| The Last Word On Nothing
I was recently in Japan with my high school graduate, a promised trip to a place I’d never been. My takeaway, besides humid summer heat poaching us in our own juices, is the wild green that took over anything humans left untouched. Hills are a chlorophyl riot, rugged canyons buried in canopies, creek after creek dancing through boulders and shadow. Even in the pulsing core of Tokyo, we’d find a temple and walk a trail through the woods getting there, washing our hands at a bamboo spigot ...| The Last Word On Nothing
You might have read this post before. And you might have read it while listening to Jack Black sing “Peaches.“ And maybe you did both of these things while eating a peach!| The Last Word On Nothing
Last Monday, 7/14/2025, NPR ran an interview with a woman who lived through the flood on Texas’s Guadalupe River, a terrible story and I paraphrase:| The Last Word On Nothing
I am not a person who grew up with dogs. Taiga—my first and only—came into my life when I was 29, an adventure companion that outshone all others. She is the muttiest of mutts, small and trim with foxy, rabbit-soft ears. Until recently, when people asked me what kind of dog she is, I would simply say that she’s “the best kind.” Then a lady at the post office exclaimed that Taiga was, in actuality, “a special tiny wolf,” and by Jove, that lady had it right. I introduce her proper...| The Last Word On Nothing
Fossils from the Burgess Shale, because creationists would definitely hate the Cambrian Explosion. (Credit: Brooks Hanson) The Scopes Monkey Trial was held 100 years ago this month, but it feels like just yesterday. Actually, it feels like today; it feels terrifyingly like tomorrow. The theocrats are ascendant, friends, and their rejection of evolution is tied to all the other monstrosities they’re imposing on public life. Theodosius Dobzhansky said that nothing in biology makes sense excep...| The Last Word On Nothing