Interests

Author Jesse Burton’s inspiration for The Miniaturist was a dollhouse that the author saw on display in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum* when she was on vacation. Made in 1689 for the real Petronella Oortman, the dollhouse was a detailed, elaborate, and precise replica of the Dutch woman’s own home. Fascinated by the exquisite furnishings for a doll’s house cost as much as the home in which it was displayed, Burton couldn’t help but wonder “Why?” That answer and her research led to The Miniaturist. more »

From Dr. Gilad D. Evrony: "I would never have predicted that I would spend my final month of medical school performing fetal ultra-sounds on a pregnant gorilla, phlebotomizing a 500-pound tapir with hemochromatosis, caring for a meerkat in heart failure, and investigating medical mysteries across the animal kingdom. Yet spending the final month of my MD-PhD program working at the veterinary hospital of a zoo was one of the more remarkable and humbling experiences I had during medical school — a unique capstone to my education as a physician-scientist;" - And a Peaceable Primate Sanctuary created to fill an unmet need and to provide a sanctuary for baboons retired from use in biomedical research, as pets or entertainers more »

In high school, after reading novels by C. P. Snow describing academic life at Cambridge University in England, I decided that I wanted to be a professor (little did I know that this vision of academic life was nothing like reality, at least in the US). In sophomore year, my inner-city high school biology teacher taught us about the experiments of Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644) showing that a piece of soiled cloth mixed with wheat yielded mouse pups after a 21-day incubation. This sealed the deal — I wanted to be a biologist. more »

Editor's note ... We stumbled upon this essay while preparing the post for SeniorWomen.com: Nicolas Ricketts, a Curator at The Strong, asks: "What makes a game classic? Part of the answer is longevity. Most people consider chess classic; we've played it for centuries. What about playing cards? Woodblock-printed cards appeared during China's Tang dynasty (618–907), while written rules for card games were first seen in 15th-century Europe. Games such as Monopoly in the 1930s and Scrabble during the 1950s broke sales records at first... Like chess and playing cards, these games are now available in electronic formats, but people still enjoy the tabletop versions. In the spirit of those other famous games, I’d like to propose the tile game Mahjong as a potential classic." more »