Women Special

As Isabella Bird, in her seventieth year and in the middle of her last great adventure, sat across from Sultan at Marrakesh, telling him tales of her adventures in her soft, measured voice, she surely had cause to reflect upon the increasingly improbable series of events that made of the daughter of an eccentric clergyman one of the world’s most celebrated explorers.  She was, in appearance and deportment, the sort of unchallenging figure who was expected to move from drawing room to drawing room, feasting on local gossip and plunging into local charity work as the sum total of her life’s activities, and yet this short, plump, gray haired woman had seen villagers eviscerate a tiger on the Malay peninsula, climbed a volcano in the Sandwich Isles, witnessed the invasion of Korea during the Sino-Japanese War, wrangled cattle in Winter’s sting in the Rocky Mountains, and spoken with the holy men of deepest Tibet. For the first half of her life, Isabella Bird (1831-1904) could wel...

[ Editor’s Note: This story originally published October 27, 2017 ] Did you know… today is Frankenstein Friday ! The unofficial holiday has been celebrated each year on the last Friday of October since 1997. Its creator, Ron MacCloskey of Westfield, New Jersey, dreamed it up as a way to keep the legacy of Frankenstein alive and pay homage to the “mother” and “father” of one of the greatest horror stories ever told – Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797 – February 1, 1851), who started writing her legendary novel in 1816 at the age of 18, and Boris Karloff, who played Shelley’s monster in the 1931 film adaptation. Aside from achieving literary greatness at such a young age, Mary Shelley comes from good WYSKy stock… her mother Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797) was a British writer, philosopher, and pioneering advocate of women’s rights (i.e . in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , circa 1792), she argued that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only...

In 1896, the city of Bombay recorded its first case of bubonic plague, a disease which would grow to claim ten million lives over the following decade as the government stumbled after a consistent health policy to combat the bacterium.  At the outset of the epidemic, as doctors were warning the government that the dreaded Black Death of medieval infamy was eating into the heart of Britain’s Imperial showcase city, the government, in a move depressingly familiar to anyone reading this in 2020, decided to waste crucial months downplaying the existence of the disease at the request of Bombay’s merchants so as not to upset the city’s trade. While the Advocate of India declared flatly that there was no bubonic plague in India, a doctor who had gained renowned as the motivating force behind women’s medical education in India took up her pen and, in the pages of the Bombay Gazette , lambasted the government for its economically-motivated inaction, and its continued inability to coordina...

14-year-old Anika Chebrolu was just named the winner of the 2020 3M Young Scientist Challenge, an annual innovation competition hosted in partnership with Discovery Education. The eight-grader from Frisco, Texas earned the ‘America’s Top Young Scientist’ title for using in-silico methods to identify a molecule that can selectively bind to the Spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in an attempt to develop a potential cure – in the form of a novel antiviral drug – for COVID-19 . When Anika entered 3M’s 2020 Young Scientist Challenge her original goal was to identify a lead compound that could bind to a protein of the influenza virus to develop a novel anti-influenza drug. But she switched gears when the COVID-19 pandemic quickly spread across the globe. In an interview with CNN , the young scientist whose future goal is to be a medical researcher and professor explained, “Because of the immense severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and the drastic impact it had made on the world in su...

There is a special poetry in rocks available to a select few and utterly incomprehensible to absolutely everybody else.  While ninety-nine pairs of eyes out of a hundred will glaze over when asked to look at a rock wall for more than two consecutive minutes, that one remaining pair can linger there for hours, pulling from the formations a saga of profound forces exerting their influence over unimaginable time scales.  Commonly caricatured as the least dynamic of scientists (there is a joke about a biologist who switched fields to geology because algae proved just too fast-paced for her), in reality the ability to see epochs of change and conflict frozen in a thin layer of rock is just next-door to a super power, and there are few people whose shoulders deserve a cape quite as resolutely as the Stone Lady of Geology, Florence Bascom (1862-1945). For three decades, based from the geology department at Bryn Mawr University that she created, Florence Bascom alternated summers of ...

Picture a composer. What you’ve probably brought to mind is an image of a tortured soul, locked away in a dim attic, quill in trembling hand, trying desperately to scratch out the last bars of a monumental symphony before he (and of course it is a he you are picturing) keels over and romantically dies of tuberculosis, or syphilis, or both, at the age of thirty-two, mourned only by his dog and his creditors.  This image, of the composer as a lone tragic genius, has so saturated our sensibilities for the better part of four centuries that we can’t easily conceive of how a composer might exist otherwise to the point that, when somebody comes along who breaks that pattern, it is difficult for our brains to fully recognize them as a real composer. It is a failure of our collective imagination, which has kept the classical public from recognizing and celebrating a new generation of composers who are doing some of the most exciting things to hit the musical world since Schoenberg dispe...

Today, September 25, 2020, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (March 15, 1933 – September 18, 2020), a true American hero, lies in state at the U.S. Capitol , the first woman in U.S. history and only the second Supreme Court justice to be honored in this way. As we mourn her loss, and celebrate her life and work, which she dedicated to fighting for women’s rights, defending civil liberties, championing gender equality, and keeping the wheels of justice spinning at the highest court in our nation (even while battling cancer fives times), we are proud to pay tribute through this incredible portrait by 13-year-old artist, poet and author Trisha Rao. What’s particularly special and complex about Trisha’s RBG is that it’s a digital art collage she created using eight different acrylic paintings from her ever-growing portfolio of work. As her mother, Sumana, pointed out to us, “If you look closely – RBG’s hair is created with one painting, the black gown with another, and the ba...

The art of Strenuous Living is one we usually associate with the generation of nervous over-achievers who grew up after the US Civil War, during the age that saw the American frontier officially disappear, and the cult of violent self-exertion find its most charismatic spokesperson in the barrel-chested polymath, Theodore Roosevelt.  And yet, it was not Roosevelt, nor even any American, who pushed the idea of the Strenuous Life to its fullest potential in the bustling opening years of the Twentieth Century, but rather a rich Englishwoman, an alpine mountain climber and desert explorer, archaeologist and diplomat, author and linguist, who formed a nation and protected its historical treasures through the depth of her brilliance, the strength of her resolution, and the breadth of her sympathy. She was Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), the privileged daughter of a well-established and massively influential iron-and-steel dynasty, and had she been made of less determined stuff her life might...