I made a YouTube video! It's about a failed historical proposal to import wild hippos to Louisiana, covering some bizarre history and discussing invasive species from an environmental perspective. Enjoy!
Broken Tulips & Impossible Colors: The Science Behind the Beauty of Flowers
Honey bees have five eyes but can’t see the color red. In addition to two large compound eyes, the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, has three simple eyes called ocelli located on the top of the head for female bees and on the front of the head for drones (male bees).1 The purpose of the…
Continue reading ➞ Broken Tulips & Impossible Colors: The Science Behind the Beauty of Flowers
Why is Dracula Catholic? The Influence of Eastern European Folklore on the Modern Vampire
Bram Stoker’s Dracula was drawing on a two century legacy of vampire stories. The concept of the modern vampire was developed by Western Europe starting in the late 17th century, through compiling and conflating various superstitions. While the origins of the vampire are from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, these superstitions were never developed into…
Narrative Structure & Tragedy: A Look at James Joyce’s “A Painful Case”
James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” appears to be among the more conventional of the stories in Dubliners. Stream of consciousness is used sparingly, the plot is well-defined (in comparison to stories like “The Sisters,” where events are left ambiguous) and the third-person narrator often interjects the text with authorial statements. However, the story raises unanswered…
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A Girl Called Peakie: The Best Children’s Book You’ve Never Heard Of
There’s something uniquely special about secondhand books, a book with a history of its own, whether its a well-worn, heavily annotated copy of a classic or an out-of-print obscurity. In the case of the latter, it can feel like no one else in the world has read the book but you, that the writer might…
Continue reading ➞ A Girl Called Peakie: The Best Children’s Book You’ve Never Heard Of
The Creation of the Other: Science, Frankenstein, & Philosophy
Frankenstein fleeing from his creation, from the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, published by Colburn and Bentley Mary Shelley, writing her masterpiece in pre-Victorian England, was living at a time when the majority of biological science was still a complete mystery. Frankenstein was published five years before the invention of the stethoscope, and modern medicine was…
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Tarot Cards & Fishing Kings: The Women of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land
Tiresias, transformed female by Hera after striking two mating serpents with a stick (Johann Ulrich Krauss, c. 1690) T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land aspires for universality and the disruption of boundaries between one character and another. But the stated goal of creating a poem where “all the women are one woman” presents challenges, potentially…
Continue reading ➞ Tarot Cards & Fishing Kings: The Women of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land
ginevra lee 