Check Out These Blog Posts From Steve McEllistrem

Bristlecone pines are the oldest trees in the world, some of them around 5,000 years old. But clonal colonies – groups of genetically identical individuals – can survive much longer than that. One such colony of quaking aspen, nicknamed Pando, covers 106 acres in Utah and is not only one of the largest living organisms in the world, it’s also one of the oldest, at approximately 80,000 years old. There was a trapdoor spider in Australia – Gaius villosus – ...

We chase happiness. We hunt it down like predators. And when we finally catch it, we worry it in our jaws, shaking it back and forth until it slips away. Something else comes along to distract us. Another shiny bauble to chase, something even prettier than the lovely little item that made us happy yesterday, which now looks rather tarnished, dull and faded and even ugly in this new light. Although the Founding Fathers weren’t expressing a philosophy, they might ...

We live in a post-reality world now, one that allows for truth to be whatever the loudest voice says it is. Obviously, this isn’t true for all of us, or even for the majority of us, but it’s true for a sizable minority. A basketball star says that the earth is flat and because he has tens of thousands of fans and followers, some of whom aren’t that well grounded in reality, a few believe him. The president lies practically ...

Happily Ever After – This is how most children’s books end – and they lived happily ever after. What a cruel punishment! To live happily ever after is to live in ignorance of the state of the world, to be unaware of the problems people have created for each other since the dawn of our existence. Yes, one should strive for happiness. I don’t dispute that. Happiness is a fine goal, but it ought to be tempered with knowledge. To ...