🚿(under)water

The very same qualities that have made the “domestic fishes” famous in China have made them infamous in the United States. A well-fed grass carp can weigh more than eighty pounds. In a single day it can eat almost half of its body weight, and it lays hundreds of thousands of eggs at a time. Bigheads can, on occasion, weigh as much as a hundred

What the student needed above all was the chance to learn to think for himself. So he ought to pursue the line of investigation that interested him most, just as, conversely, a professor ought to be perfectly free to devote his own efforts however he chose. One term, a course of twenty-one lectures was offered on sharks alone, a favorite topic of

Part of our job, then, as parents, is to teach our kids to deal with the impermanence of these connections. When Katie and I got our kids their first pet, a brilliantly purple betta fish, we viewed it as being a lesson in death and loss (bettas only live a few years) as much as a lesson in caretaking.

If you don’t have the ocean waiting to crush you, or a puma stalking you through the forest, you have to manufacture your own sense of stakes, of generative urgency.