Meet The Smithsonian Bird Detectives Saving Lives

Carla Dove heads the Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Lab. There, they use forensic ornithology—which involves identifying birds from their parts, both big and small—to better understand the damage caused when birds strike airplanes. The goal is two-fold: to allow manufacturers to build damage-resistance into their jets and to help ground crews ensure that airports become unappealing habitat for local and migratory birds, for the safety of the flying public.

Today Dove’s lab inspects around 11,000 dead birds a year. After Sully’s plane hit the water, federal investigators sent in 69 bagged samples. Sometimes the remnants are relatively whole: a carcass, large bone fragments, a severed head. Sometimes they’re just snarge, which must be carefully wiped from fuselages, wings, and the inside of engines using paper towels or alcohol wipes to preserve bird DNA.

As with most detective work, identifying birds is both art and science. Largely intact samples can often be matched to corpses in the Smithsonian’s library. When bird leftovers are particularly gooey, they’re analyzed by DNA-sequencing machines that the Museum of Natural History keeps in-house. Tissue samples are prepared as slides and placed under a microscope, where Dove’s team looks for minuscule details that can help them make a match with samples from the collection.

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‘I’m Good, I Promise’: The Loneliness of the Low-Ranking Tennis Player

Conor Niland clearly has some bitterness toward his time on tennis tours, but he still presents a clear-eyed picture of the harsh realities of being a low-seeded player, struggling to improve your ranking. It’s a hard life: to work toward a dream that remains just a little out of reach. I appreciated hearing about the graft of those struggling to make it—a story we rarely hear.

There are three tiers in the hierarchy of men’s professional tennis. The ATP Tour is the sport’s top division, the preserve of the top 100 male tennis players in the world. The Challenger Tour is populated mainly by players ranked between 100 and 300 in the world. Below that is the Futures tour, tennis’s vast netherworld of more than 2,000 true prospects and hopeless dreamers.

I wasn’t schlepping my way through the lower ranks of the professional tour for the money or the prestige, both of which were in short supply. I, like everyone else, was there to remove myself from the clutches of the lower tiers. The Futures tour sometimes felt like a circle of hell, but in practical terms it’s better understood as purgatory: a liminal space that exists only to be got out of as quickly as possible.

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The Rise of October 7th Tourism

This uncomfortable piece describes the coach tours that visit the site of the October 7th massacre in Israel. Already. The vast majority are from the US. It is “diaspora homeland tourism,” and it’s huge, “an employee of the Israeli Tourism Ministry telling Ynet, ‘There’s never been wartime tourism on this scale.'” The sights Maya Rosen describe are truly chilling—but so is the whole operation. Prepare to be disturbed.

Hundreds of people milled around the site. I counted a dozen coach-sized buses in the parking lot; all but one had carried Jewish groups from abroad, including two from the Dallas Jewish Federation, one from the Minneapolis Jewish Federation, and one from the US-based Sephardic Community Alliance. People wandered around wearing “Beis Knesses North Woodmere Israel Mission” zip-ups and “White Plains Stands with Israel” baseball hats. I heard one man murmur that it felt like being in New York after 9/11, while another responded that it was more like being in the killing fields of Poland. A group of American Jews stood in a circle with a guitar singing religious songs. Chabad had set up a truck for men to come and put on tefillin.

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We’re So Back

In this piece, Lukie Winkie asks, “[C]an anyone truly optimize their way back into the good graces of an ex?” The various “get-your-ex-back coaches” on the internet would have you think so. Winkie questions their advice—which boils down to avoiding contact for a while—and asks whether these notoriously expensive “gurus” are taking advantage of people in an emotional state. Another question to consider: should you get back with your ex?

Breakups are a foundational part of life. They happen all the time. A couple might be unable to find equitable ground on a variety of existential questions—parenthood, faith, lifestyle—and call it quits. Or two people can slowly grow distant from each other, without either party being the sole author of the discontent, until they mercifully concede that the love has flickered out. Sometimes, a relationship can detonate in spectacles of pure id—ravenous infidelity, screaming arguments, sobbing in bar bathrooms, 200 texts per hour—eventually leaving both ends of the partnership feeling raw, extreme, and ideally, free. The point here is that relationships often come to an end for a good reason, but coaches like Lichtenwalner believe that with the correct approach, anyone who’s been recently dumped can devise a way to mend even the grisliest wounds.

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In France, a Swimming Pool With a Story

Aislyn Greene recounts living abroad in France and navigating her new, foreign yet exciting life, one suddenly full of possibility. It was where she discovered—along with the joys of swimming at the beautiful and historic Piscine Saint-Georges—her sexuality.

I think the foreignness of my new life also paved the way for this awakening: Because everything was unfamiliar, my perspective on the world and my place within it shifted. I was different in France, which meant that—just maybe—I could be different at home. Could I have found this part of myself if I’d moved to, say, New York, instead of France? Perhaps. But I think it often takes a total shake-up of our life to shake truths out of ourselves—and travel can often be a vehicle for that transformation.

I didn’t act on this awakening in France. I didn’t go to gay clubs or go on dates with French women. That was much too scary back then. It felt enough to just hold on to the truth. Like I needed time to build myself up, physically and mentally, and the pool was my chrysalis, preparing me to return home, metamorphosis complete.

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The Mysterious Tyranny of Trendy Baby Names

Do you think you have chosen a unique baby name? You probably haven’t. In this fascinating essay, Daniel Wolfe explains how the baby names people choose follow trends—even when we don’t realize it.

Nowadays, she said, people not only have access to unlimited cable channels and the internet, but those innovations have helped usher in a “username creation” mentality — meaning that if someone else has the same name, it’s viewed as taken. So parents tend to tweak their baby’s name just a bit — keeping the “-son,” for example, while swapping the “Ja-” for “Car-.”

Wattenberg finds “an incredible irony” in this. People think they’re choosing something totally unique, but they do it in a way that winds up moving with the zeitgeist. As a result, names have actually gotten less distinctive over time, with nearly half of all baby names now following identifiable suffix trends — a phenomenon Wattenberg calls “lockstep individualism.”

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The Adoption Paradox

Through some casual cruelty inflicted by her grandmother, Fiona Sampson learned at an early age that she was adopted—the “cuckoo in the nest.” For Aeon, she excavates the stigma she experienced and carries still, as an adult.

The new adoptive family, forming like a scar, is built on loss and breakage. It has to try and heal each corner of its triad: biological parents who have lost (or chosen to lose) their kids, adoptive parents who are often dealing with infertility and the loss of the dream of ‘kids of their own’, and an adoptee who will grow up without the restful privilege of a family that is ‘their own’.

Over the years, I’ve come to think that my grandmother was also poking me. My childish psyche, tentacled like a sea anemone, would shut if she hurt it enough. It did shut. And she was compelled to make it do so because I was a stranger in the family. The cuckoo in the nest, a phrase I got to know well. Both a stranger: and so anomalously strange that I would eventually pass more and better exams than any of her four biological grandchildren.

I don’t know how much I was priced at, but I do know that my grandmother told my mother they could have paid more and got a younger baby. I know from my case file that it was less than a week before Christmas and that, if I wasn’t placed before the holiday, I was to be put into an institution. My file also tells me I was hard to place because I was a girl. And also because someone has noted on the file that my biological mother is plain and I resemble her.

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