“What day is it?” asked Pooh. “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet. “My favorite day,” said Pooh.” ―
Quote of the Day
“It is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.” – Rene Descartes
Jean Craighead George
By the time Jean Craighead George had finished writing her last book, 173 wild animals had lived in her house.
That figure does not include the dogs and the cats. It does include the turkey vulture (her first pet), the crows, the owls, the raccoons, the tarantulas, the bats, the foxes, the falcons, the geese, the chipmunks, and the long succession of other species who came and went freely from the back porch of her old house in Chappaqua, New York, between roughly 1944 and her death in 2012. They were not in cages. They were not behind glass. They came in through the door, ate at her table, slept where they pleased, and at the end of the season — when the light shifted and some old instinct turned in their bodies — they let themselves out and went back to wherever it was they had come from.
Each one of them, before they left, gave her something her library could not.
A character. A detail. A verified piece of behavior. A line of dialogue she could put in the mouth of an animal in one of her hundred-and-some books for children.
Her most famous of those books is the one almost every American who attended elementary school after 1960 has read.
It is called My Side of the Mountain.
Jean Carolyn Craighead was born in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1919, into one of the most extraordinary American naturalist families of the 20th century. Her father, Frank Craighead Sr., was an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and an obsessive naturalist who spent every weekend pulling his three children — Jean and her older twin brothers, Frank Jr. and John — into the forests around the city. They studied owls. They identified plants. They climbed trees. They learned to make fish hooks from twigs. Their mother, Carolyn, was a fellow naturalist who shared the obsession.
Jean’s twin older brothers grew up to become two of the most consequential wildlife biologists in American history. Frank Jr. and John Craighead’s twelve-year radio-telemetry study of the grizzly bears of Yellowstone National Park, conducted from 1959 to 1971, fundamentally rewrote what scientists understood about grizzly population dynamics and is widely credited with helping protect the species from extinction in the lower 48 states. The brothers had a long and famous battle with the National Park Service over the closing of Yellowstone’s open garbage dumps, which the Craigheads correctly predicted would cause a population crash before they had finished their fieldwork.
Their younger sister Jean took the same family obsession in a different direction.
She graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1940 with degrees in both English and Science. She worked as a reporter for the Washington Post in the 1940s and was a member of the White House Press Corps. She married a fellow naturalist named John L. George in 1944, and the two of them co-wrote her earliest books for children — including the American Woodland Tales series, beginning with Vulpes the Red Fox in 1948.
She started keeping wild animals at home around the time the children started arriving.
She and John had three children: Twig C. George (who would grow up to be a children’s book author herself), Craig George (who would become an environmental scientist), and T. Luke George (who would also become an environmental scientist). The household they grew up in was, by every account anyone has ever given of it, like nothing else in suburban Westchester County. Bats in the refrigerator. Owls in the bathroom. A crow at the breakfast table. A raccoon in the hallway. The owls came naturally — Jean’s brothers’ lifelong work with raptors meant that every Craighead family gathering had at least one bird of prey in attendance. The raccoons and the foxes and the chipmunks came in, in Jean’s later words, because she could not stop them and did not particularly want to.
Most of them, when the season changed, simply left.
Her 1959 book My Side of the Mountain — about a boy named Sam Gribley who runs away from his family’s small Manhattan apartment to live alone in a hollowed-out hemlock tree in the Catskill Mountains, surviving on his own foraged food and training a young peregrine falcon named Frightful — won a 1960 Newbery Honor and has not been out of print since. It has been on American elementary school reading lists for sixty-six years. There are several generations of American adults who can still remember exactly where they were sitting when they finished it. Most of them, somewhere quietly inside themselves, briefly considered whether they could actually do what Sam did.
Sam was Jean. She had been him.
She and John divorced in 1963. She kept writing.
In the summer of 1970 — alone now, with her youngest son Luke in tow — Jean traveled to the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory in Barrow, Alaska, where a small team of scientists was attempting something nobody in modern Western science had quite tried before. They were learning to communicate with wolves. The research was led by the wildlife biologist Gordon Haber. The team had identified the specific signals — postural, vocal, scent-based — by which wolves communicated within a pack, and they had begun, with small successes, to use those signals to communicate back.
Jean tried it.
She told the story for the rest of her life. She had stood out on the open tundra outside the Barrow lab. She had used the postural and vocal cues she had been taught. A wolf had answered her.
Two specific images from that summer — a small Inuit girl walking alone across the tundra outside Barrow, and a magnificent alpha male wolf leading his pack in Denali National Park — stayed with her for more than a year before she sat down to write what would become her most famous book.
Julie of the Wolves was published in 1972. The story of an Inuit girl named Miyax — who runs away from a violent forced marriage on the North Slope of Alaska, gets lost on the open tundra, and survives by patiently earning the trust of a wolf pack — won the 1973 Newbery Medal, the highest American honor in children’s literature. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. It became, like My Side of the Mountain, a permanent fixture on American school reading lists. It was followed by two sequels: Julie (1994) and Julie’s Wolf Pack (1997).
Jean kept writing, kept keeping animals, and kept writing about them, for the rest of her life.
She wrote more than a hundred books for children. She wrote two cookbooks for foraged wild foods. She wrote her own autobiography, Journey Inward, in 1982. She wrote up until her death, working on her last manuscripts in her ninth decade. Her brothers Frank Jr. and John outlived her, eventually dying within nineteen days of each other in 2016 at the ages of 100 and 99. The three Craighead siblings — born within three years of each other in the early 20th century and shaped by the same Maryland woods on the weekends — collectively shaped how Americans understood and cared for wild animals for the better part of a hundred years.
Jean Craighead George died on May 15, 2012, in Mount Kisco, New York. She was 92 years old.
She had spent nearly a century trying to tell anyone who would listen one specific thing about the natural world.
It is not a destination. It is not a documentary. It is not a school field trip.
It is something you let into your kitchen. Something you learn the language of. Something that, if you are patient enough — and if you do not panic, and if you do not put it in a cage — speaks back.
Work With Your Soil
What happens when you stop fighting your soil… and start working with it?
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You’re building something worth handing on.
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Lynn Margulis
(Tom: Another story about a person who could look being ridiculed by “experts” who could not or would not look and the tough progress truth makes against stiff opposition.
Truth wins in the end.
You just need to be strong enough to outlast those who cannot or will not look.)
Lynn was born in 1938. Chicago Illinois. Jewish family. Smart kid. Really smart. Enters University of Chicago at 16. Younger than everyone. Doesn’t care.
Meets Carl Sagan. Future famous astronomer. Science nerds. Fall in love. Marry 1957. She’s 19. He’s 22.
Lynn gets masters 1960. Wisconsin. Then PhD 1965. Berkeley. Genetics. Cell biology. Has two kids with Carl. Dorion 1959. Jeremy 1960. Busy mom. Busy researcher.
Marriage falls apart 1964. Two brilliant scientists. Two big egos. Carl wants traditional wife. Lynn wants her own career. Doesn’t work.
1966 she gets first job. Boston University. Biology department. Age 28. Just starting out. Marries Nicholas Margulis. Takes his name.
She’s been thinking about cells for years. Something weird. Mitochondria especially. Little energy factories inside every cell. Keep us alive.
Mitochondria are weird. Have their own DNA. Separate from cell’s main DNA. Have their own ribosomes. Reproduce independently. Divide on their own schedule.
Mitochondria also look exactly like bacteria. Same shape. Same size. Same membranes. Same division method. Noticed since late 1800s. Nobody can explain it.
Russian biologist Konstantin Merezhkovsky wrote theory 1905. Maybe mitochondria used to BE bacteria. Got swallowed by ancient cells. Stuck around. Became part of cell. He got ridiculed. Theory forgotten 60 years.
Lynn rediscovered the idea. Takes it seriously. Connects the dots. Chloroplasts too. Green parts of plant cells. Also have own DNA. Also look exactly like bacteria.
She goes further. Proposes whole theory. Calls it endosymbiosis. Complex cells started simple. Then swallowed other cells. Some swallows became permanent. Those became organelles.
Every human cell contains descendants of ancient bacteria. Your mitochondria came from bacteria eaten billions of years ago. Still living inside you. Still making energy. Mind blowing.
Lynn writes it up. 1966. 50 page paper. “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells.”
Sends it to Science magazine. Biggest journal in America. Rejected. Too speculative. No direct evidence.
Sends it to Nature. Biggest journal in world. Rejected. Too weird. Too much theory.
Sends it to Cell. Rejected. Sends it to PNAS. Rejected. Sends it to Journal of Cell Biology. Rejected. Sends it everywhere. Rejected everywhere.
15 journals reject Lynn’s paper. Fifteen. Senior biologists think she’s crazy. Think she’s resurrecting debunked theory. Say mitochondria can’t be bacteria. Say evolution doesn’t work that way.
Lynn doesn’t stop. Keeps sending it. Keeps defending at conferences. Gets laughed at. Gets talked down to. Senior scientists lecture her about basic biology. Like she doesn’t know anything. Young woman. No credentials. Easy to dismiss.
Finally 1967 Journal of Theoretical Biology accepts it. Smaller journal. Less prestigious. But they publish it. Lynn is 29.
Response is devastating. Senior biologists mock the paper. Say she has no evidence. Say it’s pseudoscience. Say she’s embarrassing herself.
She goes to conferences. Gets heckled. Senior biologists interrupt her talks. Make fun of her ideas. Colleagues stop talking to her. Don’t want association with crazy theory lady.
Boston University almost denies tenure. She’s too controversial. Too unconventional. Department almost fires her. She nearly loses career over theory.
But Lynn keeps working. Keeps researching. Keeps pushing. Writes book 1970. “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.” Expands theory. Yale University Press. Small print run.
Then things start changing. 1970s molecular biology advances fast. DNA analysis becomes possible. Scientists can compare genes. See how related they are.
Carl Woese at Illinois. Ford Doolittle at Dalhousie. Michael Gray. Several groups doing ribosomal RNA analysis.
What they find stuns everyone. Mitochondrial DNA is more similar to bacterial DNA than animal cell DNA. Chloroplast DNA almost identical to cyanobacteria DNA. Molecular evidence is unmistakable. These organelles really were bacteria.
1978 Robert Schwartz and Margaret Dayhoff do key experiment. First experimental proof. Prove mitochondria descended from specific bacteria. Alpha proteobacteria. Your mitochondria are domesticated typhus relatives.
By early 1980s endosymbiosis theory is widely accepted. Goes from crazy to mainstream in 15 years. Textbooks get rewritten. Biology courses change. Lynn was right all along.
Lynn is elected to National Academy of Sciences 1983. Age 45. Highest honor for American scientists. Vindication from peers.
She works with James Lovelock. He proposed Gaia Hypothesis. Earth is one living system. Lynn gives it biological credibility.
Moves to University of Massachusetts Amherst 1988. Distinguished Professor. Teaches until death. Students love her. Brilliant lecturer. Unconventional. Funny. Provocative.
1999 President Clinton gives her National Medal of Science. Highest science honor in America. Official recognition.
2008 Linnean Society gives her Darwin-Wallace Medal. Named after Darwin and Wallace. Lynn is in their company now.
Writes many books. Most with son Dorion Sagan. “Microcosmos” about bacterial history. “Five Kingdoms” about taxonomy. Millions of copies sold.
Argues with Richard Dawkins. Famous British biologist. Dawkins says genes compete. Lynn says cells cooperate. Different views of evolution. They debate for decades. Never agree.
November 22 2011. Age 73. Dies at home in Amherst Massachusetts. Hemorrhagic stroke. Five days in hospital. Surrounded by family. Peaceful. After most productive controversial career in modern biology.
Think about Lynn’s story. Young woman. Age 28. Just started career. Proposes theory contradicting 50 years of science. Says cells are built from swallowed bacteria. Science world laughs. 15 journals reject her.
One journal finally publishes. Senior scientists mock her at conferences. Colleagues stop talking. Nearly loses tenure. Career almost destroyed.
She keeps working. Keeps writing. Keeps teaching. Keeps fighting. Builds the case. Builds evidence. Refuses to give up.
Molecular biology catches up. DNA evidence confirms everything. By 1980s her theory is in every textbook. Every biology student learns endosymbiosis. Every human knows we have ancient bacteria in our cells.
Evolutionary biology changes completely. Before Margulis evolution was mainly competition. Mutation. Natural selection. Survival of fittest.
After Margulis people understand cooperation too. Different organisms can merge. Become new organisms. Symbiosis drives evolution.
Medical research changes too. Understanding mitochondrial DNA revolutionizes disease diagnosis. Mitochondrial diseases. Genetic testing. Ancestry testing. All possible because we understand mitochondrial heritage. All built on Margulis’s foundation.
Her papers still cited thousands of times yearly. 50 years after publication. That’s rare. Her landmark 1967 paper still foundational. Still required reading.
2017 biology community celebrates 50 year anniversary. Special journal issues. Conferences. Tributes. Scientists who rejected her now honor her.
She’s inducted into National Women’s Hall of Fame. Posthumously. Named in lists of greatest scientists. Her tenacity becomes legendary. Story told to young scientists. Shows them how to stand up for ideas.
Biologist proposes theory at 29. Says cells contain ancient bacteria. 15 journals reject her. Scientists call her crazy. Nearly loses job. Keeps fighting. DNA proves her right in 1980s. Now in every biology textbook. Changed evolutionary biology forever.
Charles Fraser-Smith
To everyone at the Ministry of Supply, Charles Fraser-Smith was just a clerk in the Clothing and Textile Department.
He shuffled papers. He placed fabric orders. He took the train from Hertfordshire each morning and sat in a cramped London office, and nobody thought twice about him.
That was precisely the point.
His real work happened elsewhere, under direction from MI6, in sessions with anonymous voices on the telephone who would call with requests that sounded like riddles.
Four hundred miniature cameras. By next week.
Three hundred Spanish Army uniforms. By month’s end.
A trunk capable of preserving a human corpse in dry ice. As soon as possible.
Fraser-Smith never asked why. He simply made it happen.
He had a gift that is very difficult to teach: he understood how people think when they’re searching for something. And he used that understanding in reverse — designing objects that looked so completely like what they were supposed to be that no one would ever think to look inside them.
A hairbrush wasn’t just a hairbrush. Unscrew the base and out came a silk map of Germany, folded to near-invisibility, and a miniature saw blade. A fountain pen hid a compass in its barrel and a map in its ink reservoir. Uniform buttons unscrewed to reveal tiny compasses with luminous dots for night navigation — but here was the genius in the detail: the thread was cut left-handed. A German guard turning it the normal way would only tighten it further. You had to know the secret to find the secret.
Behind enemy lines, in prisoner-of-war camps, in hostile territory after a plane went down — these were the tools that brought men home. Handkerchiefs printed with maps in invisible ink that could be revealed by a substance every prisoner had available to them. Bootlaces that looked ordinary but contained thin surgical saw-wire inside, capable of cutting through iron bars. Shaving brushes with film hidden in the handle. Cigarette lighters that were also cameras. Pipes lined with asbestos for carrying documents through fire. Even food compressed into toothpaste tubes — an idea, Fraser-Smith noted with quiet satisfaction, that later became a multi-million-pound commercial industry.
His proudest invention was the hollow golf ball. Packed with a compass or a coded message, the balls had to be indistinguishable from real ones — proper weight, proper bounce, passed between hands in full view of guards. They were. They worked. Countless men navigated their way home across occupied Europe following the instructions hidden in something a German officer had personally inspected and handed back.
Fraser-Smith worked with over three hundred London suppliers, none of whom knew what they were making or why. When Treasury clerks questioned his expenses, he arranged for one particularly persistent auditor to review a specific kit — after signing the Official Secrets Act. The auditor discovered the supplier had been undercharging. Nobody questioned a Fraser-Smith bill again.
His most extraordinary assignment came in 1943. British intelligence had conceived a plan of breathtaking audacity: plant false documents on a corpse, let it wash ashore in Spain, and convince Hitler that the coming Allied invasion of Europe was aimed at Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. Fraser-Smith received the order that made the plan possible — design a trunk six feet two inches long, capable of preserving a two-hundred-pound body in dry ice without refrigeration, using evaporating carbon dioxide to do the work of cold.
The trunk was built. The body was dressed and prepared. The documents were planted. The corpse washed ashore.
Hitler redirected entire divisions away from Sicily. The Allied landings met far less resistance than anticipated. Operation Mincemeat had worked.
Working in the same world — though rarely crossing paths directly with Fraser-Smith — was a young Naval Intelligence officer named Ian Fleming. He understood intimately how the secret gadget networks operated. He knew the ingenuity and the discipline that kept agents alive. And in 1952, when he sat down in Jamaica to write a spy novel about a fictional agent named James Bond, he created a character who supplied gadgets to field operatives.
He called the character Q.
Fraser-Smith later said he “slightly” knew Fleming. Fleming, it seems, knew his work rather better than that.
The fictional Q Branch that Fleming invented was nothing like Fraser-Smith’s actual operation — flashier, more explosive, more interested in spectacle than survival. When Fleming borrowed the hollow golf ball idea for one of his novels, Fraser-Smith complained the fictional version wouldn’t have fooled an Irish farmhand, let alone a German prison officer. But the connection was real, and it ran deep.
For thirty years after the war, Fraser-Smith said nothing. The Official Secrets Act demanded silence. He bought a dairy farm in Devon, raised his family, and kept his wartime gadgets locked away. Only when the restrictions expired did he publish his memoirs and begin showing his inventions to visitors at a small museum on the Exmoor Steam Railway, spending one week each year patiently explaining how a left-handed thread had once saved a man’s life.
He died in 1992. His obituary called him “the gadget-designing genius on whom the character Q in the James Bond novels and movies was modeled.”
That might have been the end of it. A footnote to both real history and fictional espionage.
But then something happened that Fraser-Smith, with his understanding of disguise and concealment and things that are not quite what they appear, might have appreciated more than anyone.
The real MI6 — the Secret Intelligence Service — officially adopted the title “Q” for its head of technology. The department’s working philosophy became known as “Q culture.” The title wasn’t inherited from some ancient intelligence tradition. It was borrowed directly from the James Bond films.
Which were themselves inspired by Charles Fraser-Smith.
A man who built hollow golf balls to hide compasses had become a fictional character who had become an institutional title at the world’s most famous spy agency.
And then, in June 2025, the story completed its circle in a way that nobody could have planned.
The woman serving as MI6’s real Q — Blaise Metreweli, Director-General of Technology and Innovation, who spent her career building the tools that kept British agents hidden from Chinese surveillance systems and Russian intelligence — was promoted to become C. Chief of the entire service. The first woman to hold that position in 116 years.
Q became C. Reality became fiction became reality again.
Charles Fraser-Smith never sought recognition. His name was classified, his work invisible, his contribution measured only in the men who made it home because of something hidden inside an ordinary-looking object. He would have found it fitting, perhaps, that the most famous gadget-master in the world is a fictional character — and that almost nobody has ever heard of the real man who inspired him.
But that, as he understood better than anyone, is the whole point of a good disguise.
The best hiding place is the one nobody thinks to look.
Seed Planting Depth
Millard Fuller
He had not lost his mind.
He had finally found his life.
Millard had grown up poor and was determined to escape poverty by any means possible. As a child, he sold pigs, chickens, and fish bait. As an adult, he and his law-school partner built a direct-mail empire from scratch. They started by selling tractor cushions to farmers. Then cookbooks. Then real estate. Almost everything they touched turned into cash.
By 29, Millard had a sprawling house. Acres of land. Horses. A cabin on the lake. He worked 14-hour days, his mind always calculating the next deal, the next expansion, the next number on the ledger.
He was building an empire.
He was also slowly destroying his marriage.
His wife Linda was suffocating in silence. She lived in a giant house with a husband who was technically present but mentally a thousand miles away. The money could not fill the silence at the dinner table.
One afternoon, Millard came home to an empty house. Linda had packed a suitcase and taken a train to New York. She left a note saying she needed time to think about whether she wanted a divorce.
The empire suddenly looked very small.
Millard cancelled every meeting and flew to New York. He found Linda in the city, and they sat down to talk honestly for the first time in years. Linda told him the truth. The wealth had become a wall between them. He was so busy securing their future that he was missing their entire present.
In that conversation, they made a decision that would change history.
They would sell the business. They would sell the house, the cabin, the horses, the land, the cars. They would give every single dollar to churches and charities for the poor. They would deliberately make themselves penniless and start their lives completely over.
In 1965, giving away the equivalent of nearly $10 million in today’s money was not seen as noble. It was seen as a nervous breakdown.
They did it anyway.
Millard, Linda, and their four children eventually moved to a small Christian farming community in Americus, Georgia, called Koinonia Farm. It was led by a farmer and biblical scholar named Clarence Jordan. It was an integrated community where Black and white families lived, ate, and worked together, which made it a target for boycotts and even gunfire in 1960s rural Georgia.
Sitting at a wooden kitchen table, Clarence and Millard sketched out a radical new idea they called partnership housing.
There would be no charity, because charity created dependency. Volunteers would build modest houses. Future homeowners would help build their own homes and the homes of their neighbors, an idea called sweat equity. The houses would be sold at exact cost. There would be 0 profit and 0 interest on the loans. Every mortgage payment would go into a revolving fund to build the next house for the next family.
It was hard, slow, and painful. The Georgia clay was brutal. Donations were scarce. But one house was finished, then another. Families moved out of dirt-floor shacks and into warm, dry homes with running water.
In 1973, the Fullers traveled to Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to test the model overseas. In just three years, they helped build more than 120 homes. That convinced them the idea could work anywhere on earth.
In 1976, they returned to the United States and officially incorporated their work as Habitat for Humanity.
Then in 1984, a former president named Jimmy Carter, who lived just down the road in Plains, Georgia, put on work boots and showed up at a build site in New York City with his wife Rosalynn. The cameras followed. The world finally saw what Millard and Linda had quietly built. In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded Millard the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Millard Fuller died in 2009 at age 74. He never became wealthy again. He never wanted to.
Today, Habitat for Humanity operates in all 50 U.S. states and in more than 70 countries. Since 1976, the organization has helped over 65 million people build or improve the place they call home.
Tens of millions of people sleep tonight under safe, sturdy roofs because one young millionaire sat in a hard moment with his wife and decided that his marriage was worth more than his money, and that his money was worth more in someone else’s home than in his own bank account.
A fortune cannot build a home if it breaks the people living inside it.
The empire is gone.
The houses still stand.
Mikhaila Peterson on Psych Meds
“I will be jumping up and down about psych med injury awareness from now on, as it’s impacted my health as well, and is devastating.” Mikhaila Peterson. Link to her video:
Root Depth Map
