There’s a scourge eating away at the quality of online journalism. It’s not just the partisan news outlets, the well-disguised native advertising, or the websites full of off-the-wall rants; it’s sites that publish such a range of material that the good reporting is indistinguishable from the bad. Take The Mind Unleashed, a relatively young news…
Open-ocean predators, like tuna and sharks, don’t settle down as happy homemakers, content to prowl amongst the corals of one reef. Instead, these hunters perform surprisingly long migrations, chomping on seafood from numerous marine ecosystems. The source of sashimi sushi, bluefin tuna can tantalize our taste buds. But, these tuna cost much more than our…
Here in the Santa Cruz mountains, poison oak is everywhere. My dog tromps through it, and I tromp after her. I feel fine. Presumably, this means I am one of the lucky 30 percent who are immune. It also means the dog and I could be covered in poison oak oil, and I wouldn’t know….
Monarch butterflies always take me back to elementary school. I remember watching and waiting for weeks as bright green caterpillars munched on milkweed plants in our classroom terrarium, then wound themselves overnight into snug chrysalises. Just writing ‘chrysalis’ makes me feel like I’m 10 again and peering at the dangling little insect sleeping bags, wondering…
Last weekend we made our annual trek to the pumpkin patch. While my kids scoured the field for their future jack-o-lanterns, I pursued a box of gourds, marveling at the variety. They were yellow, orange, green, white, round, bottlenecked, squat, elongated, smooth, undulated, and bumpy, in every permutation. I went for a twisty, warty, mostly…
