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upine stuck to your hands how are you going to clean up all that blood if you can t put down that porcupine a side story about taxidermy my father in law once found a dead fox alongside the road it wasn t a messy kill so naturally he took it home to the family s surprise foxy after disappearing into the garage of a guy in virginia for a few weeks soon took up residence in the corner of the den in a sit and watch pose one day while visiting pop pop our shiba inu took issue with foxy there was quite a resemblance and unceremoniously removed its left ear the wound gave foxy a certain james bond coolness like a scar or an eye patch it read as didn t back down one eared foxy now sits on the bookcase in pop pop s office i try to stay out of that room there s a really old buck head in there and a dead bird or two and god knows what else let s just say we have different taste in decor if someone offered him a mounted porcupine i m guessing he d make room for it that s all i ve got to say on this subject illustration conrad gessner 1516 1565 porcupine from the first volume of historiae animalium zürich 1551 foxy and friends by ross holland leave a comment sleeping in space by craig childs june 29 2026 almost every night since late february i ve slept on our deck watching the star scape creep westward month by month scorpius recently came out of hiding and now the great space scorpion is standing on its tail in the middle of the southern sky jupiter has been sailing toward the evening glory of venus power and love nearly touching then passing each other by this is how i ve been clocking the intricate movement of days weeks and seasons using the glowing shifting cosmos as a timepiece two thousand years ago polynesians sailed and paddled the pacific to find a lone fleck of an island by following wave patterns clouds winds fish birds dolphins and mostly stars at the same time on the other side of the world minoans were crossing the mediterranean sea by stars setting off from the island of crete fixed on the big guns of arcturus altair spica aldebaran sirius rigel betelgeuse and the phosphorescent triad of orion s belt each star rose over the position of a trade city 500 miles across open water the hypothesis has been floated that those distant cities grew to their stature because their rising stars made them easy to locate from crete opening them to sea trade the fourth brightest star in the night sky arcturus has become the one that tells me how much sleep i ll get on the deck this golden orange pinpoint has been moving over the top of the sky around 11pm inching farther west by midnight when i crawl into my sleeping bag and arcturus is directly overhead that means it s early enough i ll get a full night s sleep continue reading leave a comment sounds of silence by cameron walker june 26 2026 this post first ran in the early days of the pandemic there are some parts of the silence that i miss but today i am working in the back room of an elementary school as the adult on site during a camp run by high school students there is singing and shrieking and laughter and the sound of small feet running down a concrete hallway i brought my noise cancelling headphones but i ve hardly used them i don t want to miss this people who have come to visit say that it is quiet here now it is even quieter fewer car drive by fewer planes fly overhead in the hour before dawn i no longer hear the train whistle my neighbor used to leave early each morning for dental school 50 miles away now there is no hum and rumble that is a subaru engine starting up at first i didn t even notice these sounds were gone what i noticed were the birds so many birds they started up around 5 around the same time i understand now as flights and train whistles and people heading off to early morning destinations this new quiet has opened up soundscapes that we haven t heard before andreas von bubnoff a journalist and professor based in germany and new york is listening in i know andreas through scilance a group of science writers that has been meeting up online for 15 years he is the co founder of the pandemic silence project which is collecting sound recordings from around the world to capture the soundscapes of the pandemic andreas grew up in germany next to a forest and spent time hiking with his family he still remembers the sounds the soothing rustle of wind through the leaves the buzz of insects in alpine meadows the calls of birds like the eurasian skylark his first big soundscape project was a multimedia project on soundscape ecology for the german publication frankfurter allgemeine zeitung in 2015 the project captured the sounds of nature on land and in the water as well as human sounds that have drowned them out we often aren t even aware that many sounds disappeared because we don t remember the sounds having been there in the first place he says perhaps the current pandemic silence is a big chance for many of us to learn how to listen again continue reading leave a comment storia by ann finkbeiner june 24 2026 for years i ve been mildly obsessed with this idea that history and story are related they re siblings if not actually the same creature and that the relation lies in human cultures that didn t read didn t write communicated only by talking i m not sure why that seems so absurd and fascinating history and story being the same thing because they began with people who didn t read i wrote this may 29 2015 a couple years later i had further thoughts and went so far as to ask some experts i m still thinking about it one time a long time ago friends were over everybody talking and one of the little kids got antsy so i picked up a book and started reading very quietly so as not to disturb conversation but pretty soon nobody was talking any more everybody was quiet and listening to winnie the pooh and piglet track the heffalump i ll bet you can sit in any small coffee shop open a book start reading aloud once upon a time and by the third paragraph the whole coffee shop will be dead silent stories i ve always thought of them as addictive entertainment for which for some reason we happen to be hardwired i m not alone in thinking this a certain amou nt of creative thinking has gone into the idea of humans being wired for stories another time i was trying to learn italian and found out that storia was the word for history then i found out that storia also meant story it meant both history and story and i was desperately confused history and story are distinctly not the same thing not at all write a history of something the reader should more or less believe it write a story about the same thing the reader rightly thinks it s katy bar the door i thought about this some more and became indignant history is done by scholars trained in finding and assessing evidence and arranging it in the order in which it happened stories are the authors constructions arrangements in whatever order the author likes this is pretty much the standard view of anyone who speaks english too bad for the english speakers i read in wikipedia that all european languages including the rest of the germanic ones also use the same word for history and story then i ran history through google translate and tried picking the non european languages and they were pretty much split on whether history and story should share the same word i m not claiming scientific rigor for this but it seems true enough and what the ever loving hell is going on here i ve been fretting about this for years in what sense are history and story the same thing meanwhile i was working on a story on how native americans handled their 10 000 year co existence with cascadia s massive earthquakes and tsunamis the tribes didn t traditionally write their history down they told it to each other and about a century ago what they said got transcribed some of what they d tell was clearly myth story thunderbird and whale were fighting and some of it was clearly history the giant wave caught people without their canoes and they all drowned i read all these stories and histories and then interviewed the people whose grandparents had heard them and then i had one of those lightning bolt perspective switches i remembered my grandmother and her sister in their rag top jeep driving the dusty country roads me in the back seat hanging on and listening with all my might talking about every farmhouse we passed who lived there who they were related to who their wives and husbands and kids were what they did in high school what they were doing now on and on my grandmother and her sister were doing what the native americans did they were telling stories they were talking history both at once same thing so i derailed those interviews right away from geologic catastrophe and asked the people who d been told the stories about the telling itself it turns out you have to be trained member of the huu ay aht tribe i have to start in the late 1950s and early 1960s i visited my brother who lived with my great grandfather and had to listen to a lot of stories at dinner table and in the evening you have to sit down and listen just like you have to go to school and it happened around mealtime evening when there s no electricity and your evenings are idle we just had a gaslight candles and a woodstove we had to be there we had to sit and listen it was education things we needed to know people are designated to remember my brother and i were chosen to hear the stories and given the responsibility to pass them on i passed it on to my son and he knows as much as i do member of the grande ronde tribe the storytellers are identified early on and are trained the historian was a very responsible position you couldn t alter the stories and you had to retell them exactly as they were told i read anthropology research in africa that found the stories were more accurate than the written word member of the coquille tribe my uncle said we have to go on a five hour drive to this place where a tsunami had happened so i can tell you this story and that s the best way to tell a story at the place so we went to gold beach and did then a mile and a half hike up the hill he showed me the fog coming up the river just like the tsunami and told me the waves came up that river and all the trees were covered and that s what made the story real i ve been fortunate because every time someone has something important to say and wants it remembered they talk to me and they want me to be accurate if someone gives you something like that accept the gift the way they gave it to you now i suspect that the history story merger has its origins in pre literate cultures history told as stories told in ways and places that make you remember them by people who accept responsibility for remembering them who are trained to do it and constrained by accuracy sounds like a good plan for carrying on a culture for building a civilization and just like that i ve figured out the very good reason that stories and histories are so related and why they re hardwired _____ photo credit thibaud saintin leave a comment the wisdom of a summer afternoon by christie aschwanden june 22 2026 lately i ve been thinking about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it my training as a scientist taught me to revere the scientific method and i continue to hold science in the highest regard science can teach us much about the world and ourselves and as i ve written elsewhere it can allow us to see beyond our biases if we can keep open minds yet i ve grown to understand that not all knowledge worth possessing can come from a book an experiment or a google search science is very good at answering questions that involve quantifiable elements how far away is that planet which drug produces the best response but it s less helpful at answering some of life s most vexing questions like what should i do with my life where should i focus my attention two years ago this month i discovered an answer to a question i hadn t thought to ask how should i spend a summer afternoon i present my found answer here in the form of a letter a tribute to a friend i hardly knew but will never forget as if a letter to chris dourley august 2009 i arrived at your house with a book tucked under my arm a little something to express my support as if words could cure what doctors couldn t i did not yet understand that it was you my dying friend with the gift to bestow and me its fortunate recipient that early august afternoon we sat on your porch and watched the rain clouds roll in over the west elk mountains and i said that i had not yet climbed mount lamborn you reminisced about your many journeys up and down the mountain s steep slopes and offered me an introduction to your old friend you pointed to the gully i should ascend and told me which ridge to choose for the climb to the summit looking further east i remarked how striking the ragged mountains appeared from this vantage point and you told me how the sun as it followed its daily arc across the sky would cast shadows on the cliff faces in patterns that only someone who had spent many early mornings afternoons and lazy evenings observing could fully appreciate you told me about discovering this patch for the first time more than 20 years ago and your surprise that no one else wanted this mesa top at the end of a bumpy dirt road where you had found your life place with a twinge of envy i told you how i longed to be one of those people who belonged to a place like that who d made it my own through devotion and the passing of time you nodded knowingly and then we quietly sat back and watched the storm clouds wash over the mountains and as we listened to raindrops drum a gentle rhythm on the tin roof above the porch i felt consumed with gratitude that you d shared this moment of grace with me thankful for having borne witness to this ephemeral pause when we could forget that you were dying and lose ourselves in the comfort of an ordinary afternoon as if these unremarkable events from which we piece our lives together could go on forever as if the beauty of the here and now could suspend us as if this moment could protect us from what s to come this post was first published on august 3 2011 photo of lost mesa by christie aschwanden 1 comment trump meets an indigenous movement by neil shea june 19 2026 anaktuvuk pass alaska neil shea photo in may doug burgum the u s secretary of the interior traveled to the tiny town of anaktuvuk pass alaska to announce a new policy caribou hunters will soon be allowed to use all terrain vehicles inside the gates of the arctic national park and preserve under most circumstances this would piss me off another misguided plan from an administration that seems hell bent on wrecking environmental protections and green energy initiatives often for no reason beyond a desire to own the libs or worse line the pockets of trump allies this sort of anti life energy is unfolding b...