Author; mammalfish

My newest radio piece for VOA News! Listen in here: I would like to thank VOA reporter Steve Baragona for letting me steal the phrase “thieving lemurs.” More information can be found in the accompanying web write-up for this story. Way more information can be found in the publicly accessible PLOS ONE paper. If you’re […]

I am a bag of organs on stilts walking around a solid world. The only ways I have to peer out of the dense particulation of myself are my eyes to see photons, my ears to hear airborne vibration, my nose to sense airborne chemicals, my tongue to do nearly the same, and my skin […]

My first two stories at VOA News are figuratively hot off the presses! The first was an explanation of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn patents on specific genes, which, unlike many court cases, had plaintiffs on both sides of the aisle walking away smiling. The second is MY FIRST RADIO PIECE! Reporting on […]

On the train in front of me there are a woman and a young boy. The boy is plump and startled-looking, and the woman is fat and ugly and carries a carved walking stick. They do not smile. They sit in front of me and suddenly they are deeply involved in some crisis; the woman […]

Y’all are amazing, and I can’t overstate how useful it is hearing about how news works over at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Sacramento Bee, and Wired. How about after this whole mess is over the fourteen of us start our own newsy business? “The Young Scientist’s Report,” we’ll call it. Or, “Modern Microscope.” Ew. […]

After several whirlwind weeks of typing and clicking out final exams, in which I got progressively squintier and paler; two days of packing my Brooklyn apartment, my houseplants, my trusty new bike, and my boyfriend into a U-Haul; four days of blissful dizzy rest in the wet green woods where I grew up, looking for […]

At the end of the day they peeled off their crusted stockings, furrowed in blankets, the soft soiled bedding of stuffy dens, gasped for air sweat and sleep on the first dense night of summer, one sore pair of ankles for every room in the city.

The following contains material from a recent talk with a chinstrap penguin, interviewed near his summer home on the shore of the Ross Sea. “It were horrible,” said Moe the penguin on a gusty, frigid Wednesday. “I were just mindin’ me own fish business, and it were clear water all the way to icy bottom […]

When I was about sixteen, I came home from school. “I think I have a new hobby,” I told my mother when I walked into the kitchen. “What is it?” she asked me. “Evolutionary biology,” I said. She’s never stopped laughing about this. Neither have I. It’s a strange hobby. In the years since, I […]