The Science Essayist

I’m four, going on five, and walking with my class along a corridor that goes between the room where we take our naps to the room where we paint our pictures. I’m wearing the tiny red-checked uniform of my kindergarten. It has a pocket on the right hand side, and inside it is a piece [...]

At five I couldn’t see the point of hair. I wanted it out of my way, so my mother obliged. She circled me slowly, shearing it off to just above my chin, and the air filled with a most satisfying ripping sound. Close to my ears the scissors crunched, closing their legs hungrily on my [...]

In the months after I quit my teaching job, addled from the accumulated unease of days spent in battle and carrying my failure like an extra limb, I found there was nothing more soothing than stillness. Breaths grew small, hands rested quietly against thighs, feet found their place and kept it. I remember one train [...]

There is a particular family of creation myths, emerging out of different cultures all over the world, from the Americas to India to the ancient lands of Central Europe, whose stories loop back and back again to a common center. The universe, they all say, was once a vast, primordial ocean. When things began there [...]

On an early January day in Chicago this year, my muscles twitching in protest of the cold and the sky around me bright with winter sunshine glancing like arrows off the curves of strangers’ sunglasses, I stepped into the Fern Room of the Lincoln Park Conservatory to warm my face with the humid breath of [...]

I don’t know what it’s like for you, but there are days when it feels I’m like meeting someone for the first time. Her features seem foreign to me, and that, in its way, is not so far from the truth.
I don’t know what it’s like for you: there are days when I am [...]

I don’t even have to touch her, sometimes, before it begins; on my approach, her ears unfold to my footfalls, each one a triangular flag hoisted by a tiny sailor. Chin lifts from crossed paws, emerald eyes widen, and I couldn’t stop it now if I tried—for even before my thumb has arrived at her [...]

There is a wonderful H.G. Wells story in which a taxidermist, puffed up like a Magnificent Frigatebird (Fregata magnificens), lists the feats of stuffing and mounting he has achieved so far: an elephant; a moth; a great auk; several human beings. His litany culminates, to the narrator’s enthrallment and horror, in the following remarkable boast.
“But [...]