Wes Phillips

"In the weeks after my husband moved out, I received an email from someone offering to help me clean the house or cook, an email that evokes images of dishes piling up in the sink, flies hovering around half-eaten peanut-butter sandwiches, laundry accumulating. I wonder where these nightmarish visions of our domestic situation are coming from. Why would the departure of my husband launch me and my daughter into a life of squalor? Someone else writes: 'There are no words for a catastrophe of this magnitude. I am thinking of you.' And it begins to seem as if my husband has, in fact, not moved five minutes away but died."

Those rubber">http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070428/bob9.asp">rubber duckies oceanographers have been tracking since 1992 are about to make landfall in the UK. Not the first time Old Blighty has been menaced by an armada.

Bagheera, like all cats, is a lawyer. It's not a table, it's a counter, in the sun—in the cattery.

Neil Gaiman argues that the science fiction novels of H.G. Wells, while fine, pale compared to his short stories. Gaiman says that the SF stories survive, while "many of the mainstream novels he considered more important and significant are gone and, for the most part, forgotten, perhaps because the novels were very much of their time."

"A stinking, rat-infested cesspit that would never be tolerated now." And your point is . . . ?

"The same acoustic silence, embedded in two different excerpts, can be perceived dramatically differently," writes Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis in an article in the June issue of Music Perception.

You can tell how nimble an animal is by checking the size of its inner ear.