Olivia Anderson had recently returned to Bridgeport, Illinois after a year of living in Budapest, and she needed a place to live. She was tired of tugging at the end of her parents’ leash and wanted to choose her own path in life. This meant paying for her own apartment. Her best friend Emma Chase had been earning her own way since her junior year in high school. Her lease on a $300-a-month hotel room apartment
If you’re all alone on Thanksgiving Day, with no turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy, your heart aching from loneliness and neglect, and your shame keeping you from making even one single phone call to some relative who is surrounded by devoted loved ones, just keep in mind that, for what it’s worth, we’re together in this poem, sharing these words. Sleepy late-afternoon football chatter will fade away, but this conversation will last
Humanity is facing an inevitable catastrophe that world leaders continue to ignore due mostly to indifference and blind ignorance. This means that the public and scientific community need to more proactively address the issue to avert disaster. Specifically, many don’t even realize that on July 23rd, 2012, a massive solar storm of two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) barely missed Earth. Had the CMEs arrived one week earlier, they would have
Only a handful of species address each other individually. For instance, there’s some evidence that bottlenose dolphins use learned vocal behavior to call each other by name. They become acquainted with signature whistle sounds from birth and associate these sounds with identity. Linking particular sounds to identity is an ability inherent to human language. Of greater interest, a recent study of the Egyptian fruit bat tells us more about ourselves than
I dug for you in the deep rich soil, my hands plunging further and further into the ground, into the past, searching for traces of your soul, only to find a decayed, unreadable letter.
Steve Weber hadn’t stayed in touch with anyone from the little farm town he left as a teenager. The place was a static reminder of high school glory or failure, early marriage, divorce and custody battles, dead-end jobs, and not much else–the face of endurance masking a vortex of interior desperation. Forty-one years later, he found himself surfing Facebook and visiting some of his old high school acquaintances’ profiles to
