Jeffrey Glassberg is a butterflier, which means that he not only watches butterflies through binoculars, he also keeps records of how many he sees, takes photographs […]

At about the same time Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp, a Moravian missionary in the Danish West Indies, recorded that some Kongos on the island performed a certain type of baptism on the bosals [recently arrived slaves] who desire it.

rat-tail radish (Raphanus caudatus); wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum)

My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t have a library of some sort. The present one is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time.