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Continue reading →: Three Peeves and the Door They GuardCatherine catalogues three irritations – weaponised busyness, sensory-hostile spaces, tidy narratives – and discovers each is a mirror. Her standards have become walls. With Thanksgiving approaching, she sets herself an uncomfortable experiment: invite David and family over, then let something stay imperfect without rushing to fix it.
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Continue reading →: ‘Scott of Girton’: The Woman Undergraduates Cheered Into Cambridge HistoryA woman silenced by deafness yet heard by undergraduates who drowned out Cambridge’s refusal to name her. From illegal exam-taker to Bryn Mawr’s founding mathematician, she demanded rigor over sympathy, built a department, trained three female PhDs, and reshaped how mathematics is taught. Why did history forget her?
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Continue reading →: Borrowed ConvictionsThey call this place a school. How terribly civilised. I’m granted library privileges today – such magnanimity. One reads Milton between decorative bars, contemplates truth whilst they peddle pretence. Apparently even seditious women deserve improving literature.
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Continue reading →: The Inner Circle, Named AloudCatherine confronts her professional discomfort with the word ‘favourite’ and names her current inner circle: Father Walsh at dawn, Jenny’s conspiratorial library wisdom, David’s careful domesticity. She commits to extending two concrete invitations, transforming private sentiment into actual chosen presence.
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Continue reading →: Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanasyeva: The Physicist Einstein Wouldn’t Publish – How Thirty Years of Rigorous Work on Thermodynamic Foundations Remained Hidden in Plain SightTatyana Afanasyeva co-authored physics’ most influential encyclopedia article on statistical mechanics, yet history credits her husband alone. After his death, she spent thirty years developing rigorous thermodynamic foundations – work Einstein praised but refused to publish. Her story exposes how collaborative genius becomes erased.
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Continue reading →: Favourite PeopleSitting here in the church shadows, turning over a daft question: who are my favourite people? Funny how a word like that doesn’t fit what I feel for the wife, the lads. Technology’s racing ahead, but love – that’s something older, heavier.
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Continue reading →: The Creatures Who Greet Us at the DoorA morning encounter with Tom’s dog and a sun-warm bench prompt Catherine to consider which creatures she’s trusted into her carefully ordered life – and whether she’s finally ready to let something depend on her in ways that can’t be scheduled away.
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Continue reading →: Mary Sears: The Oceanographer Who Mapped Death and Saved Thousands at Tarawa – How One Woman’s Tide Tables Changed the Course of the Pacific WarMary Sears reveals how her midnight tide calculations saved thousands of Marines at Tarawa and beyond – and why the Navy desperately needed her expertise while refusing to let her on research vessels. The oceanographer who mapped victory speaks candidly about classified wartime intelligence, institutional bias, and the mathematics of…
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Continue reading →: Hollow BonesThis afternoon in Marcus’s studio, surrounded by fox bones and silent paintings, I find myself reckoning with beauty, vulnerability, and the strange comfort of hollow things. Even the crow skull seems to know what I’ve lost.
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Continue reading →: Twice Daily: On Tides and StayingFaced with the perennial question – beach or mountains? – Catherine walks New Corinth’s windswept shoreline and weighs the allure of solid peaks against the lessons of flux. A meditation on tides, community, and why staying put might be the braver climb. Québec beckons; the harbour holds.
