by the time he had reached Mitchell's where Dymphna would surely be at a corner table, there would be seven or eight people with him, all dogged-up, and several attractive girls.

A presignal ahead of the streetcar stop allows the streetcar to pass into the unloading zone only after all the nonrail-bound traffic has left.

In his first book since the 2008 essay collection Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, David Quammen looks at the natural world from yet another angle: the search for the next human pandemic, what epidemiologists call “the next big one.” His quest leads him around the world to study a variety of suspect zoonoses—animal-hosted pathogens that infect humans.

He grumbles about the food constantly, but has yet to learn to cook.