This is a newsletter that I created in June of ‘24 so that I could shamelessly guilt my friends and family into reading about science. Oftentimes when I experience transient hyperfixations on topics such as, for example, the cicadas of the Aegean Sea region, or domesticated viruses, an essay emerges from my brain. This newsletter has become the place where I store them.
wricing about pangenomes (rice pangenome research)
the cicadas of the mediterranean (featuring a discussion of acoustic divergence of sympatric European cicada species)
i needed an avian influenza reference document so I wrote one for myself (but it’s for you too) (HPAI in spring 2025)
the world is built at night (the functions of our dreams)
not so foreboding dirt: recent discoveries on mars (teaching myself a few things about Mars, a planet which I knew very little about before writing this!)
the blob (as in, the mysterious marine heatwave in the Pacific Ocean)
why don’t some vultures have a syrinx? (musing on why many vultures’ vocalizations only extend to grunting and hissing)
discovering endoparasitoid wasps and their viruses (why wasps with endogenized tracts of viral DNA gained a selective advantage)
the misfolded nightmare: prions (a description of this terrifying and strange disease-causing protein)
I’ve also written some shorter, personal essays for A Teetering Vulture. Here are links to a few of them:
As part of my work as an educator with a raptor rehabilitation center in Cincinnati, Ohio, I write science articles for Wingbeats, their quarterly newsletter:
I am also a writer for a nonprofit publication that’s all about celebrating women and gender expansive people in my city, those who are building community and in general doing good things in this corner of the world: