“The birds’ early activity shows that the dawn chorus doesn’t begin with light–it begins in anticipation of it.”
“The consistency between lab & natural conditions showed that the mechanism is universal. The motivation to sing builds in darkness, & light sets it free.”

www.earth.com/news/scienti...

“Her writing reminds us that representation – forging words into sentences to capture things, places, people, histories – is the primary effort of fiction, its fundamental act.”

Pico Iyer’s “Aflame: Learning from Silence.”: The silence sought and found at the Pacific retreat is, in effect, a silencing of the will. This stilling of “the flow of the purposeful” is precisely how…the Swiss thinker Max Picard defined the idea of silence. lareviewofbooks.org/article/eloq...

On Mavis Gallant: Her fiction…enigmatic &elegant…could also be scrappy, blunt &odd, full of inexperienced people with few resources making dubious choices due to the pressure of their circumstances…would be surprised to learn that happiness was even an option…”

spectrumculture.com/2025/03/25/t...

“Vitamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles…two doses of the [MMR] vaccine are about 97 percent effective.

…vitamin A can cause liver damage…doctors at West Texas hospitals have said they’ve seen patients with yellowed skin and high levels of liver enzymes…both signs of a damaged liver.”

Data: Congestion Pricing is Not Rerouting Traffic to Other Boroughs

Traffic on 4 outerborough bridges dropped in Feb— defying MTA forecasts…

At the same time, vehicle entries into Lower Manhattan dropped by double digits since congestion pricing began

nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/03/12/d...

“The Many Lives of Sayeda X” by Neha Dixit: bookended betw 2 riots (1990&2020) the life of an “unseen” woman in Delhi working 50 odd jobs to survive. Life of every marginalised women in many countries, yet also uniquely hers due to her religion& socioeconomic status:
writingwomen.co/the-many-liv...

Katherine Rundell:”There’s a willed optimism inherent in the act of writing for children…To write those books is to insist tht though the world burns,& there is more fire to come,it will always be worth teaching children to rejoice…worth showing them hw to build an internal blueprint for happiness.”

Pico Iyer & Caryl Phillips on migration, Walcott, Naipaul &home.
“home is the place, for me, where, when you arrive, they don’t want to take you in…even the most undefended refugee shares many of the questions that we carry…”—Pico Iyer

granta.com/in-conversat...

Canids as pollinators? Nectar foraging by Ethiopian wolves may contribute to the pollination of Kniphofia foliosa (Ethiopian red hot poker)
esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

About 125 years ago, four Lakota nuns enlisted as Army nurses, traveling from North Dakota to Florida, to Georgia and eventually Cuba to help wounded soldiers.The first known Native American women to serve in the United States military.

19thnews.org/2023/11/firs...

The horrifying desiccation of the Amazon: sumauma.com/en/infografi...

Photo: Severe drought has altered the landscape of the Solimões River in Manacapuru, Amazonas State, forcing the local population to make drastic changes to their way of life.