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Being a bug is a chancy thing. From the moment your egg is laid, you are the target of a vast array of predators hungry for your gushy, nutritive innards. Chances are, you will never make it out of your egg, as hosts of other insects either eat you directly or scoop you out to make room for their own babies to grow in the resources prepared by your mother. Out of a hundred eggs laid, it is a good day if a few dozen occupants make their way out, hopelessly, ludicrously exposed

In 1947, the partition of India carved out a theoretically Muslim-majority territory out of the Indian state, sparking a bloody era of desperate migration as members of religious minorities in the new Indian and Pakistani nations left ancestral homes and sought safety within the boundaries of their co-religionists. That same year, a Muslim woman from northern India whose parents had recently passed away boarded a boat, seeking medical training in England, entirely unsure as t

To stand before a redwood is to remove yourself from the context of space and time as experienced by human beings. Crane your neck up as...

In 1870, botany in the state of Maine was an underdeveloped and precarious thing. In the 1670s, John Josselyn had published a brace of...

In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese armed forces fanned out across the Pacific, taking in quick succession...

In telling the story of M. Carey Thomas, there is no getting around the fundamental fact that she was, resoundingly, a terrible person....

Two scientists. Two crystallographers. Both successful, but one died young after her most significant discovery was snatched from her,...

America in the 1920s. The Jazz Age - flappers and motorcars, talkies and speak-easies - it is difficult to reflect on this time without...

In one sense, the story of Lovenia Deconge Watson (b. 1933) is the story of thousands of bright young Black women, born in the South in...

“Even though she’ll be a spinster, she’ll be able to support herself.” These lines, uttered in 1948, were the gateway to a professional...

A mother elephant staggers forward, arrows protruding from her flank and legs, poison coursing through her blood that is attacking her...

Lavinia Waterhouse (1809–1890) lived at the intersection of a tangle of ideas that, to the twenty-first-century mind, have no business...