Rachel Laudan recently published a piece on her website arguing, I think, that there is no food system and that it is unhelpful to talk about it being broken. No, and yes.

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Lovely morning for just sitting quietly in the sun waiting for the birds. And what a difference a bit of sun makes, because these were shot at 1/2000, which certainly helps.

Blue tit with a bug in its mouth just before entering its nest

Blue tit in flight after leaving its nest in a hollow terracotta sculpture of a grostesque head

There are absolutely, definitely nestlings present, but I have not heard a single chirp, nor do I want to spoil things b...

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Rebecca Solnit: On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends | Literary Hub

Rebecca Solnit reading fairy stories is not something I’m sure I want to listen to. Rebecca Solnit writing about reading fairy stories is something else again. Full of wonderful insights, this latest essay takes t...

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April was OK. We are much more fortunate than most, enjoying one another’s company, having a terrace, good ingredients nearby, jobs. We’ve got it all. Utterly selfishly, when the lockdown eases on Monday and the park opens, I'd prefer it to be open only to those of us who really want to know how nature took back ownership of the place, even if only temporarily. I know that’s not going to happen. Nor are the roads going to stay car-poor for long. But I can dream.

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About this time last year, I started taking a melatonin pill every night before bed. I had long used it for jet lag, but I think it was reading Gwern’s lengthy analysis that prompted me to try it on the regular. I began doing that a year or so ago, and at some point roughly 200 days ago I switched from a 3 mg dose to a 1 mg dose. How do I know? Because my second bottle of 200 tablets was just delivered.

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