Susan Glickman

When I met my husband’s parents in 1984, they picked us up at LaGuardia, then headed south to Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn to take us birdwatching. Perhaps they thought that the effort involved in trying to distinguish different types of shorebirds would diffuse any tension inherent in the encounter, or maybe they didn’t want to waste a long drive without going somewhere more interesting than the…

Virtually every day for twenty years, I have walked my dog (more accurately, one of two successive dogs) around Wychwood Park in Toronto. This green oasis sits on the former shore of the prehistoric Lake Iroquois. Under a canopy of 300-year-old oaks, the air is fresher and cooler in summer, the wind less biting in…

To his many fans, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise embodies the best qualities of twentieth-century humanity projected onto a twenty-fourth-century future. As our representative to other species in the galaxy, he is moral, dignified, compassionate, intelligent, and cultured, all of which is symbolized by his beverage of choice: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” Although the captain grew up in a French…

Throughout the pandemic, it has been common to hear certain anti-vaxxers proclaim their refusal to be used as experimental “guinea pigs” by malevolent scientists. Given how belligerent the most extreme of these folks generally are, it is unlikely that anyone would ­mistake them for the placid, affectionate, and highly social animals that go by that…