Recommended reads #167
What if we didn’t grade? A bibliography.
Joe Travis’s essay for the E.O. Wilson award in Am Nat is a contemporary ode to the enduring significance of natural history that I think will emerge as a classic. There are so many pull quotes I’d could share with you, but, just go ahead and read it.
Conserving honey bees does not help wildlife. Always nice to see something on this topic in the pages of Science.
A look inside the financial problems that led Concordia University to shut down
On editing as an act of caring
The MARS 2020 Rover, being assembled just up the road from me at NASA-JPL, now has a name: Perseverance. Congrats to the essayist who won NASA over with this name, 7th grader Alex Mathis.
To nurse your hangover from Super Tuesday: I don’t hate women candidates, but… (McSweeney’s), America punished Elizabeth Warren for her competence (The Atlantic), and It’s 2020 and women are exhausted (The Week).
I often forget to mention things I’ve read, but I’m trying to get better about it. I finally finished The Secret Commonwealth (amazon|indiebound), which, depending on how you count, is the fifth installation in the Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. Or the second in the Book of Dust. And, presumably, the fifth season on HBO series gets that far? It was good, I think? What I liked so much about His Dark Materials was the continuous revelations about the nature and cosmology of this world that is a parallel-ish version of our own, and this latest novel isn’t as revelatory, but leverages prior world-building to look within and understand how marginalized folks are harmed the most by societal fractures. It’s hard to imagine that his work on this wasn’t influenced by the burgeoning xenophobia in England and the associated Brexit campaign. And it’s an adventure story of sorts. So it’s an engaging read. Oh, and The Story of More (amazon|indiebound) is now on bookshelves! If you’re teaching an intro Env Studies class, this would be a great fit. I wrote more about this in RecReads164.
I hope you have a restful weekend. Oh and for the weekend, I’m not normally a share-this-recipe-with-you kind of guy, but the taste/effort ratio on these (vegan) lemon chia pancakes was astronomical when I made them last weekend.