Field Notes (Science and Environment)

It races over the Bay of Bengal. It charges through river, paddy, and city. From Boston in my WhatsApp to family in Calcutta, I speak of Arfan. Perhaps...

  Image: "Black Hole Image Makes History" NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Photostream, licensed under CC 2.0.   Michael Leach: I was inspired to write the poem ‘Black...

I admit a degree of relief that my youngest daughter is so different from me. My bookshelves are lined with novels and two...

A dandelion’s fruiting head a jeweled amphora. Spinach tissue’s blue mosaic, too beautiful to eat. Stomata dot the skin of trillium like points on a map, what’s laid bare by...

How is anything radically new ever created in nature? Is it true, as some scientists say, that everything under the sun is just a...

The turkeys are out in Cambridge. I passed one this morning on my way to church: a large male in full feather, his tail...

I never liked science. Numbers are boring. I never was this nerd guy, doing the math, imagining algorithms, checking things in a laboratory... I...

I recently caught up with the teaching assistant for an undergraduate humanities course I took years ago, that helped inspire my subsequent studies.  I...

If asked, the fox might say that one of the problems in her world, and ours, is that humans have overtaken her species as...

This is the month that tests the hidden frameworks of things: the studs within the walls of home and body—both of which, you suspect, are now becoming...