Sometimes in the study of history, the backstory is more fascinating than the actual event. Take February. Forget Ground Hog Day, this is also Black History Month. According to the History Channel website (https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-history-month), this all began in September, 1915 when historian Carter G. Woodson and minister Jesse E. Moorland founded the Association for the
An image of the Castle Bravo nuclear detonation. (Image credit: Shutterstock) When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, the Cold War was a very real thing. The great fear was a major nuclear exchange could virtually end civilization itself. Recently an article headline jolted me back to that time — “Mass Starvation After
From the “I Wish I’d Written That” Department, here’s a cute poem I found today — My Doggy Ate My Essay BY DARREN SARDELLI My doggy ate my essay. He picked up all my mail. He cleaned my dirty closet and dusted with his tail. He straightened out my posters and swept my wooden floor.
The rainbow-colored light is an artist’s concept of a galaxy without stars called J0613+52. The stars in this image are foreground stars, in our own Milky Way galaxy, from an actual starfield from the Palomar Sky Survey II. Illustration via NSF/ NRAO/ AUI/ P.Vosteen/ Green Bank Observatory. Just when scientists think they have seen it all,
Would you be surprised if I told you Frank Fish was a marine biologist? Or that Carla Dove is the director of the Feather Identification Lab at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.? These are examples of aptonyms, –people with names that fit their careers. This concept shouldn’t be too surprising,
To those who are concerned about the impact of waves of immigrants upon this country, we’ve been there before. In 1845, the Irish potato crop was attacked by a plant disease. Spreading rapidly, this mold-based scourge ruined as much as one-half of the crop that year; about three-quarters of the crop over the next seven
If you’re not tired of articles giving advice on how to approach the new year, I’ve found something that has caught my eye. I receive an email from The New York Times entitled “The Morning”. On Saturday, December 30, it published “the best advice that readers of “The Morning” received this year,” with the logic
This is an exciting time of year if you’re a professional football fan. In this, the season’s 17th week, the playoff picture is coming into sharp focus. I have been a fan all my life; during my formative years, the Cleveland Browns were the only Ohio team and star running back Jim Brown was in
Christmas is fast approaching, so it’s time to repost my Christmas story. This was inspired by a friend who works as a department store Santa. He once described meeting a little girl with a special wish, and I took it from there. This is included in my book, Stories: Short and Strange, available on this website, and
Occasionally I find an article in a major publication about a new way of growing food, perhaps announcing a new technology, or an indoor facility for producing vegetables closer to their markets to save transportation costs and energy. These ideas always sound promising and I wish them well. But let me cite some statistics to