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The Terrestrial Status of Boston

The terrestrial status of Boston is an unexpectedly fascinating topic. A city built on land rescued from the sea, it is not only unusually at risk from sea-level rise; it also hides parts of its marshy...

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Terrestrial Astronomy

[Image: “The Empty Quarter (Nevada)” (2021), collage by Geoff Manaugh, using maps from the U.S. Geological Survey.] I’m thrilled to have some map collages in the latest issue of the Yale Review....

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Check the Sonic

[Image: From episode 9 of Patriot, courtesy Amazon Studios.] This is incredibly random, and is perhaps indisputable evidence that I have fallen head over heels for mourning doves, but I’ve begun...

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Feathered Friends

After the previous post, I was interested to see a short piece over at The New Yorker about basically the same idea—of spotting invasive species in the backgrounds of films and television shows, but,...

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Fractalize Me

The genes that cause Romanesco, a kind of cauliflower, to grow in a fractal pattern have been identified. Researchers were subsequently able to manipulate one of those genes and get it to function...

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Impact Gardening

“Impact gardening” is the evocative term used to describe surface disturbance—and potential biological effects—caused by the crashing of extraterrestrial objects into planetary bodies. [Image: The...

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House on the Border

There’s a great detail in a recent news story about cross-border smuggling in a small northern township, where upstate New York meets Quebec. Some homes in Dundee straddle the international border...

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Until Proven Safe

[Image: Dressed in 21st-century personal protective equipment (PPE), I am standing next to Dr. Luigi Bertinato, wearing period plague doctor gear from the time of the Black Death, inside the library of...

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We Have A Ghost

In one more quick bit of news, I was excited to see that a short story of mine, “Ernest,” published back in 2017, started filming for Netflix last week under a new title, We Have A Ghost. [Image: Art...

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Looming Matter With Light

“When light collides with other light, it can transform into particles of matter,” science writer Corey S. Powell posted on Twitter the other day. He was referring to recent evidence from the...

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Article 3

It’s been an unremittingly bleak year, a situation I almost certainly made worse for myself by drifting further and further away from a daily writing routine, but I figured I should open up the...

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Home Star

This was all over the news back in October, but I am a sucker for stories like this, in which seeds of cosmic revelation are found hidden inside everyday materials, especially when those materials are...

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Molten Roads and Airbursts

[Image: Max Ernst, “Landscape with a view of the lake and chimeras” (1940), via Archive.] While we’re on the subject of astronomical events leaving traces in our everyday world, here’s another story,...

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Luminous Dreamlight

I spent part of the weekend down in Orange County, looking at birds, then the better part of an hour scrolling around on Google Maps, trying to figure out where we’d been all day. [Image: Courtesy...

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To Open Every Kind of Lock

I should have included this in A Burglar’s Guide to the City: a magical procedure used “to open every Kind of Lock, without a Key, and without making any noise,” whether you’re dealing with individual...

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Potsdamer Sea

[Image: From Kiessling’s Grosser Verkehrs-Plan von Berlin (1920).] It’s funny to be back in Berlin, a city where I once thought I’d spend the rest of my life, first arriving here as a backpacker in...

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Cleared For Approach

[Image: “Forest and Sun” (1946) by Max Ernst.] When I first saw this painting—“Forest and Sun” (1946) by Max Ernst, a composition and theme he continually revisited and changed over the course of his...

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World Store

There was an article last year in the New York Times about a California start-up called Inversion that wants to “speed delivery of important items by storing them in orbit.” [Image: Collage by...

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