Happy new year, friends!

The first Musings of 2022 include some personal goals and reflections, a couple cool creative pursuits, and several fascinating environmental reads...

How’s the year been treating you? Any interesting adventures thus far? Let me know!

Cheers,

Maya

Thoughts for the new year

• Life goals: hiking the triple crown of America’s trails in a calendar year, like these Stanford students did. Maybe not this year, but soon!
• Important question— should I start a collection of elements?

Creative things

• An update on Wordle, and some background on how the fast-growing trend was created (you may have come across some of the many other articles written about the game recently, too)— we got into this early, y’all!
• Topher Payne provides alternate endings to potentially problematic children’s books. Check out his version of The Giving Tree…
• Christopher Payne’s photos of manufacturing and industry are spectacular (I assume no relation to Topher Payne?)
• Cool art by Connecticut artist Kristen Meyer

Environmental reads

• An interesting dive into the terrapin turtle smuggling industry— some of the wildlife trafficking stories out there are just so… wild, there’s no other way to describe it. And these things are happening so close to our lives!
• Off-shore oil rigs are dangerous and very potentially hazardous— but they also provide an excellent artificial reef environment to many marine creatures. The question of what to do with decommissioned rigs isn’t as black or white as it seems…
• Why bats are the ideal hosts for disease-causing viruses, grounded in impeccable and beautiful graphics in this article from Reuters.