When you think of laundry, you probably think of piles of dirty clothing, sitting at the bottom of the laundry chute, waiting to be sorted into darks, lights, and whites. But to a very specific subset of human beings, laundering has a lot more to do with mountains of cash than polo shirts, shorts, and […]

On the morning of March 10, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 took off from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, and headed toward Nairobi, Kenya. Six minutes into the flight, the airplane, a Boeing 737 Max 8, began a nosedive and slammed into the ground, killing all 157 people on board. Even before the smoldering […]

Dairy cows are prodigious producers. You pump about one hundred pounds of feed into a dairy cow over the course of a day; usually a mixture of hay, grain, soybean meal or some other protein, and silage, which is fermented wet grass or grain. While it sits there placidly ruminating, all sorts of machinery starts […]

My grandmother was one of the most fascinating people I ever met. Me’me, as we called her, fought in the French resistance, ran a DP camp in post-war Europe, was a professor in Columbia University and traveled the world extensively. Me’me had been an emerging actress in pre-war Paris, and came from a family of […]

Sutton’s Law, a rule taught in medical schools around the country, is named after Willie Sutton, one of the most famous bank robbers in US history. Willie stole over two million dollars from banks over the course of a forty-year crime spree which included three prison breakouts. His most famous line, which he later denied […]

          A female chochineal on the left and the much rarer male on the right…. A cluster of female chocineals chilling on their cactus pad Alfonso Hernandez is a farmer who grows infected cacti on the Canary Islands (Pop Quiz! Where in the world are the Canary Islands?) While cactus plants […]