Why is it that we love the things that we love? And why is it that we sometimes recognize them immediately, as they call out to us with such insistence and power? What’s the alchemy? I’ve struggled with these questions for much of my adult life and this spring I’ve been hauling them around the Inyo Mountains, […]

In early May I heard Leslie Jamison read at Brockport’s Writers Forum. Jamison, who has struggled with intoxication, described her addiction as “an attempt to find luminosity in things that refused to yield much glow.”

It is almost time. My sabbatical year is practically finished. Soon I will resume my “normal” academic life. There will be classes, independent studies, new graduate students, meetings, and a diverse collection of research projects to attend to—plus the responsibilities, minutiae, frustrations, distractions, and pleasures (there are a few of those) associated with my duties […]

After taking what I need (length and weight measurements, photographs, a fungal swab, and a tiny bit of tail for genetic analysis), I release the salamander and watch it crawl beneath the rock where I found it, just ten minutes ago: a female, salamander number FR-25, 39.6 millimeters snout-vent length, 1.25 grams in weight, chytrid […]

During the Antarctic winter of 1911, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Dr. “Bill” Wilson, and “Birdie” Bowers embarked on what Cherry-Garrard described—without hyperbole—as “The Worst Journey in the World.” For thirty-five days they traveled under horrific conditions, hauling their sleds across the Ross Ice Shelf, enduring almost complete darkness, temperatures that plunged to -60°C, and ferocious blizzards. It was so cold that […]