Egret feathers were worth more than gold in the late 1800s, when the fashion industry used them to decorate women’s hats. These spectacular birds were nearly hunted to extinction—and might well have disappeared if not for Boston socialites Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and her cousin Minna Hall, who rallied 900 women to boycott feathered hats in […]
Two surprises popped out of a hole in the ice on a small roadside pond on Deer Isle as I drove by the other week: river otters! They didn’t seem to mind the cold and snow a bit as they frolicked on the ice and then dove back underwater. Winter is a good time to […]
Some biologists think humans might be hard wired to help others. They’re taking some of their cues from babies. I love this. Researchers have found that one-year-olds will point to an object that an adult pretends to have misplaced. At eighteen months, toddlers will assist a person they don’t know by opening a door or […]
When my book group picked Half the Sky, I thought it would be a depressing read. Wrong. Half the Sky is an unsentimental eye-opener about the oppression of women and girls, and it’s so inspiring that it moved us to take action. We realized that doing something small together could make a real difference in […]
I’ve been feeling the darkness and the depth of winter this week. Lots of sadness in the air. I’ve been trying to push this aside as I plow through a deadline, but then I decided to take a little break… I opened the back door to smell the air and was stunned to feel the […]