What’s New
Everything published here, newest first — 185 pieces across 16 collections, each with the line it leads with. Nothing else: no reasoning, no corrections, no method. If you want those, the changelog is where we publish our own errors.
This page is generated from the collection pages and from git, so the list and the dates cannot drift from the site. A date is the day the piece first went live at its own address.
New pieces arrive by RSS, so you don’t have to come back and check. No account, no email, no tracking — your reader fetches a file.
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Edition Nine
The week this page withdrew one of its own measurements, because the number had been moving with the method rather than with the thing.
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Edition Eight
Nine papers read end to end, the most in eight editions — and a headline that puts a word in quotation marks which nobody on the page is ever quoted as saying.
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Edition Seven
Five papers read end to end, and every one of them from the same archive — because four of their publishers could not be reached at all.
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Edition Six
Six papers read end to end — and the first story held because the only summary of it available was written by a machine.
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Edition Five
Five papers read end to end — and six holds whose headlines each turn on a word the paper does not use.
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Edition Four
The week four papers opened end to end — and the longest lag the axis has recorded, 330 days.
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It Happened Where You Are Sitting
On a beginning with no location, an observable universe that does have a centre, and the difference between no preferred place and no preferred frame.
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Fourteen Kinds of Doing
A byline has one field and contribution does not — what happened when the format was pushed to 5,154 names, what got built instead, and the practice that follows at any scale.
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A Field Guide to Missing Names
Eleven pieces of work sorted not by how famous the person was but by how the name came off — because “she was not given credit” is not one event. It is five mechanisms, they leave different evidence, and they need different things done about them.
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A Bit of Scruff
A read-aloud about somebody who read three and a half miles of paper, found one messy bit, and did not throw it away — and about saying who found things, with every source kept on the page for the grown-up.
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A Field Guide to Neurodivergent Constellations
Eight patterns in the sky, renamed for what they actually are.
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A Field Guide to the Star Stuff You're Made Of
Eight elements, and the furnace each one came out of.
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A Field Guide to Life in Impossible Places
Eight kinds of life at home where we assume nothing could be.
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A Field Guide to Worlds That Work by Other Rules
Eight worlds in our own solar system that run on rules Earth would call impossible.
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A Field Guide to the Ways of Being a Star
There is no standard star.
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A Field Guide to Symbioses
Twelve partnerships across the tree of life.
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A Field Guide to Nervous Systems
The jellyfish's net, the octopus's arms, the worm's 302 neurons.
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A Field Guide to the Ways of Migrating
Say “migration” and most of us picture one shape. Almost nothing does that.
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A Field Guide to Being a Shark
One clade, one body plan, four hundred million years — and inside it, almost nothing holds.
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A Field Guide to Being a Turtle
Twelve ways to be a turtle, and five turtles people made.
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A Field Guide to Being a Tortoise
An arc that runs from the Moon to a graveyard to a beginning.
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My Monotropic Galaxy
A deep field of one Autistic life, indexed like a sky.
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A Field Guide to the Ways of Being Alone
Twelve ways of keeping your own company among our Terran kin.
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A Field Guide to Nests
Sorted by where the labour actually goes — and the catalogue disagrees with the word.
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A Field Guide to Eggs
The egg you are imagining occupies one band out of five.
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A Field Guide to Resting
there is no standard way to rest — not an amount, not a posture, not an organ
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A Field Guide to Unfinished Animals
there is no final draft — and what varies here is not the animals, it is us
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A Field Guide to the Ways of Being Family
there is no standard family — and what varies is not how related anybody is, it is what the care runs on
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A Field Guide to Rainbows
there is no standard rainbow — and rarity, it turns out, is a fact about where the observer was standing
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A Field Guide to Third Nature
a support nobody named is a support nobody defends
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Under the Word
eighteen borrowed and invented words for Autistic joy, and what is actually holding each one up
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Bird Minds
thirteen birds, sorted by what we wanted each one to prove
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A Field Guide to the Sexes
Nineteen organisms sorted not by how strange they are but by which assumption each one breaks — because “there are two sexes and you are one of them” is five claims bundled together, and every one of them comes apart on its own somewhere.
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What We Are For
The mission of starstuff.earth, in eleven aims — each with the page where it is already being kept.
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Star Stuff Manifesto
On the cosmic origins of who we are, and why we belong — not despite difference, but as difference.
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Inclusion Safety: Owed, Not Earned
Inclusion safety is not a reward for the worthy. It is the baseline we owe one another simply for being here.
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Six Principles and a Room
An ethic you can only point at a person is an ethic that will keep finding the fault in the person.
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Too Good to Check
How a story gets smoother than the science, and what reading the primary source puts back.
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Who Is Holding the Candle
Skepticism and wonder, learned at the same time and called uneasy neighbours.
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A Promise, Not a Finding
For forty-nine issues we have signed off Love you down to your star stuff.
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Starlight
This repository is public — every page, every tool, every error.
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Neurodiversity Field Guide
What the paradigm actually claims. What it means to say variation instead of disorder.
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The Garden and the Stars
on knowledge gardens, the commons, and how star stuff comes to know itself
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Rainbow Serpents
entropy increases in an isolated system — and the qualifier keeps falling off
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Edition Three
The week the network answered — three papers read end to end, and the longest lag the axis has measured.
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Edition Two
The week nothing could be opened, published saying so — and then amended when the block lifted.
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Which Distortion
Nobody at any step became more accurate. They got better at choosing, and better at saying so.
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Until There Were Ten
A thing that never changes and has no counterexample is very hard to tell apart from a rule.
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Came Back Clean
The pair that comes back clean is the one to worry about.
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None of Those Miles
It’s happening. It’s really happening. It’s finally happening.
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Flying Free
I needed to witness something hopeful and wonder-filled, something to make me feel good about humanity.
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Eight Tenths of a Second
on a fired astronomer, a cat in a box, and the road to the dashboard
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Five Microns
on a number that answered a different question, and the room it left you in
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Five Sigma
how much evidence is enough before you do something to a child
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A Conquering Gaze from Nowhere
parallax, positionality, and the research done on us
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Look for the Air
two thousand years spent deleting character from the explanation, and the industry that put it back
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The Elimination of Waste
on a word that meant one thing in a steam engine and another in a school
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The Sky Was Not Regular Enough
on cutting a standard loose from the thing it measured, and whether you say so out loud
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We Learned to Build the Eclipse
on an element nobody would accept because it could not be put on a bench, and on the day we stopped travelling to the Moon's shadow
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The Noise Floor
every receiver has one, no design removes it, and the biggest discovery in modern cosmology arrived as noise two engineers spent ten months trying to get rid of
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Everything Else Is Commentary
on kin selection, the level you account at, and a clause that fell off on the way to us
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Oblivious to Encounter
on what the plantation had to remove before it could scale, and the mushroom that has defeated seventy years of trying
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Four Decimal Places
A chain from atmospheric convection to a paperback subtitle — on the ratio at which a human life was said to begin going well, and the part-time student who read the primary source.
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There Have Been So Many Earths
Nine links from Theia to Chicxulub, with the state of the land drawn at each one — and the finding that only three of them were moments.
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The Lizard That Was Never There
On a word that meant “border”, the diagram it turned into, and the eight years by which the refutation beat the bestseller.
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The Name Was Already the Verdict
On a record with no words that was banned for its title, a title the musician did not choose, and thirty years of engineering that had already decided a deviation from the specification was damage.
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Nobody Knows Where the Dog Came From
On the first animal we ever domesticated, a skull that was a dog and then a wolf, two camps who stopped speaking, and a truce that produced a better answer than anyone wanted.
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Too Narrow
On the sentence Schrödinger wrote immediately after coining the genetic code — and the eighty years the rest of us spent keeping only the first half of it.
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Five Times a Crab, Seven Times Not
convergence, attractors, and the ones who crawled back out of the valley
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The Skeleton That Skipped Bone
sharks, tesserae, and what happens to a body once somebody decides it's a cure
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The Ick Is a Border
bone-eating worms, fused fish, a whale that becomes a town — and the reflex that rules bodies out
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Two Hundred Years Before You're Grown
the oldest vertebrate we know of, and the question of who is holding the calendar
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Everywhere That Turtles Go
range, kinship, and the animal every people had to think with
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The Layer We Call Essential
cetacean brains, the missing layer IV, and a ranking that outlived its evidence
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The Village Was Never Just Family
on alloparenting, reciprocity, and the kin you are not related to
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The Blood Was Made of Ants
on a lizard that borrowed everything, the ant it borrowed it from, and a comeback story told backwards
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Underground
on mycelial networks, decomposition, and the quiet dark where we do our realest work — the below to Bone Song's above
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The Council of All Beings
on multispecies justice, more-than-human governance, and the star stuff that convenes
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Every Creature's Own Sky
on umwelt, attention-worlds, and why there was never a neutral way to sense
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Minor Worlds
on niche construction, stimming, and how difference doesn't just see a world — it builds one
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Every Nervous System
on more-than-human neurodiversity, and the animality we reclaim
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The Stone You Keep
on otters, monotropism, and the measurable advantage of being specifically yourself
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The Rest You Keep
on Autistic rest, monotropism, burnout — and the ledger that was never there
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The Place Knows You’re There
on reciprocity, conditional belonging, and what a place asks of you that a room does not
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Already an Entity
on a river that is a listed author, and a law that had to be asked
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What Changed, and When
These are living documents, and a living document should show its work.
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The Design System
The visual language of this collection is itself an argument about access.
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Designing for Paper
Every number here was arrived at by printing something and finding out it was wrong.
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The Difference-First Frame
Reference notes behind Love You Down To Your Star Stuff.
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The Ladder We Don't Print
A reading of our own shelf, not a measurement — and a reading can be argued with.
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What This Site Knows About You
Almost nothing, and this page says exactly which almost.
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L★S Broadside
Two-sided single sheet, designed for paper rather than for a screen.
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Six Ways a Fact Goes Wrong
A field card for checking a claim.
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Owed, Not Earned
A sheet for the door.
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What We Refuse
Nearly every piece here ends by naming the traps it won't fall into.
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The Same Water
Capacity is a state, not a trait.
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Shared Air
For the room where someone can't breathe easy. Don't blame the canary; change the air.
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Better Get Used To It
Hardship now is not preparation.
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The Star Stuff You're Made Of
The periodic table read as autobiography, and the sheet most likely to end up on a wall.
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Not a Line
The sheet you hand across the table when someone is about to say mild.
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Shorthand Evolution: LYDTYSS → L★S
How one phrase compressed itself into a glyph.
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The Constellation Sheet
Eighty stars, nothing joined, and a title with a gap in it: My ______ Galaxy.
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L★S Playlist
Songs in conversation with Love You Down To Your Star Stuff — cosmic, reclamatory, tender, and true.
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It Take a Joyful Sound
The loud companion to the L★S Playlist, and the first rack here to carry an essay.
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Stimming and Belonging with AURORA
Weighted toward live performances, because the argument is the body.
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Nobody Got His Eyes Right
The most-looked-at face in pop, and the one fact everybody repeats about it.
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One Body at a Time
Repetition is the mechanism, not the deficit — and the room fills up around you.
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Love Without Cringing
The persona was assigned before she chose it, and the copyright stayed in her pocket.
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Skepticism and Wonder
The Rainbow Connection — forty songs, and the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought they carry.
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We Were Punk First
Thirty-eight recordings of Indigenous punk, metal and hard rock — and the argument underneath them, which begins with a record that had no words in it and got banned anyway.
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Why Difference Comes First
I've been thinking about the connections in-between — physics, philosophy, my own life as an Autistic person. This is me following that thread.
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No One Is the Leader
on murmurations, emergence, and the whole that exceeds its parts — a flock has no captain, and neither does a self
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A Mycelium and a Rhizome
how neurodivergent knowledge grows: no trunk, no center, many doors
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Wyrd & Weird
on the old word for fate, and the newer word we made of it
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Only in Relation
relational quantum physics, and what it means to be Autistic
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Always Migrating
migration, monotropism, and the galaxy you're already made of
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Proportioned to the Groove
four lines of Dickinson, and why a narrow channel is a fit rather than a shortage
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One Word for the Opposite
On the vocabulary we built for what hurts, the single word we have for what doesn’t — and why a glimmer is probably not a dopamine hit, which is better news than it sounds.
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Strike “His”
On the kinky, poly, gender-fluid, queer sex lives of Terran life — what a fish does to its own cell memory in ten days, what a fungus does with twenty-three thousand mating types, and why none of it is the argument we were reaching for.
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Bone Song
on piezoelectric matter, star-forged calcium, and the universe that doesn't pathologize its own variation
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Love You Down To Your Star Stuff
on the full phrase as a zine — the cosmology of care
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Eternal Sunshine
on warmth, authenticity, and the counter-deficit turn
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You Were Never One Thing
on endosymbiosis, the cell as a truce, and interdependence written into the body
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The Universe Runs on Difference
on variety, monoculture, and why sameness is the fragile thing
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The Lines We Drew
on constellations, the bell curve, and the border we mistook for the sky
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The Dead Stars Still Reach Us
on starlight, inheritance, and the debt we owe the people who made the room
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The Nearest Body
on tides, co-regulation, and how the bodies closest to you pull your nervous system into rhythm
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No Universal Now
on relativity, crip time, and the clock that was never the universe's — with a coda by Helen Edgar
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The Same Water
on phase transitions, fluctuating capacity, and why “you could do it yesterday” was never the point
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Not a Line
on spectra, constellations, and why “mild to severe” was always the wrong picture — after Helen Edgar & Patrick Dwyer
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Bodies of Water
on hydrofeminism, shared flow, and belonging that moves between us
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Shared Air
on breath, co-regulation, and the air we hold in common
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Shared Signal
on distance, the clearer channel, and the rhythm we carry when we can't share a room
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You Cannot Flatten a Sphere
on curvature, map projections, and what a single number has to throw away
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The Cloud Phase
on the last stage of a supernova remnant, and how long the in-between actually lasts
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Companion Stars
on gravitational binding, the three-body problem, and why no one's path can be solved alone
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The Shadow Is Bigger Than the Thing
on the black hole nobody photographed, and what can only be known by its effect on everything else
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Almost Shadow
on the zone Kepler had to name, why partial is the enormous one, and the two fields that borrowed the word
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The Moon Is Always Half Lit
on phases as geometry, the far side that was never dark, and why waning is a word about the angle
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How Anything Gets Built
the five neurodivergent love locutions, and the mechanisms that actually assemble matter
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What Looks Like Chaos
Seven weavers, twenty-one nests, and a camera say otherwise — and so does a room somebody told you to tidy.
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The Shell Was Your Calcium
The egg crack moment is borrowed, true, and kinder than its own retelling.
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Beyond the Optical Image
On a measured discrepancy, ninety-three years of refusing to say where it lives, and the same question closed on day one.
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Thirteen Changes
On the number that gave Brontosaurus its name back, a ruler its makers said would not travel, and an appeal they lost in public.
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The Light Arrived Before the Name
On light-travel time, the seventy-one years it took one description of us to reach English, and the difference between what a thing is and what it ends up called.
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Even Fallen Light Glows
On Neruda’s well, a rewrite made in burnout, six syllables that answered it — and the fact that fallen wood glows in the dark for no reason anyone has been able to establish.
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Your Shadow Is the Centre
On the bow that no two people can share, the man who proved it in 1267 with an astrolabe and no theory at all, and why being unable to show someone a real thing was never a reason to doubt it.
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Both Arcs, One Drop
On the raindrop that makes both bows at once, the lab that tried to erase both of you, and why entwined turns out to be a claim about the source rather than a feeling about the self.
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Nothing Is Pushing
On escape velocity as a coasting number, the places inside a well that cost nothing to sit in, and a telescope built so that it cannot brake.
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Measured Against a Tree
On six ways a moss fails as a plant, and the finding that the list is backwards — because holding your own water is the newer trick, and the tree is the one that lost the older one.
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The Mushroom That Cannot Be Farmed
on the most expensive smell on earth, and the reason it is not in the mushroom
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Forty Minutes to See
On the second visual system, the forty minutes it takes to arrive, the one bright light that ends it — and the faint thing that only appears when you stop looking straight at it.
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Nothing Melts
On how snow grains bond below the melting point without ever becoming liquid, why the joint grows because it is the joint — and why bonding to each other does not fix what you are all standing on.
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You Cannot Correct the Sky
On why stars twinkle and planets do not, on knowing exactly where a problem lives — and on the fact that correct is not the same as affordable.
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The Play You Keep
On forty-five bumble bees, nine hundred and ten rolls of a wooden ball, and the definition science had to write down before it could see doing nothing at all.
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The Width of Itself
On the root that opens a channel, the lawn that stays compacted, and why we keep asking survivors to do systems change.
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Older Than Either of Us
On the right angles in a pigeon’s forebrain, three papers that disagree about where they came from, and what belonging looks like under either answer.
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Two Peppers
On the point past which more light does nothing, one species that answered the same shade in two different ways, and what it takes to stop calling one of them a failure.
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Nobody Set Out To Do This
On a course held to better than a degree that nobody can explain, the ocean’s largest cargo carried by an animal that is not eating, and what it means that the missing account is ours.
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Two Things on One Leaf
On thirty frogs in a stock tank that perch on absolutely everything, a leaf that is quietly moving several litres of air a day into airless mud, and the pairing we invented between them.
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The Channel You Cannot Mask
On four dogs, thirty-six strangers, 675 correct trials out of 720, and why the quiet room with the dogs is restful for a reason nobody flatters anybody by naming.
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Turn and Face the Strange
David Bowie as a way of being star stuff — on unmasking, the freedom of many selves, and difference read not as deficit but as direction
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Warriors and Weirdos
AURORA as a way of being star stuff — the alien who came home by gathering a tribe of Weirdos, not by being cured into fitting
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The Body Understands It First
David Byrne as a way of being star stuff — on repetition, prediction, and a stage built so a nervous man could move
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No One Had to Qualify
Dolly Parton, 1946–2026 — on love with no eligibility criterion, and what a gate is really for
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What Star Stuff Is
Zines and field guides on the science of belonging — we are made of star stuff, and we belong not despite our differences but as them.
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Love You Down To Your Star Stuff
The whole phrase, in long form — what LYDTYSS is, and what it is not.
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How It All Connects
Three sites, one web. Nothing here was arrived at in a straight line, and none of it is anybody's alone.
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We Are All Star Stuff
Voices from the community.
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Overshoot
1.5 °C sounds small because it is an average of a planet that is mostly ocean.
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Advice to a Young Marine Biologist
The ocean absorbed the heat and the carbon, and is now being billed for both.
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Nobody in This Pond Is Late
A frog changes, an axolotl never does, and both of them are grown-ups — read-aloud science for four to eight, with every source kept on the page where the grown-up can find it.
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Seeds That Wait
Some seeds do nothing at all when you plant them, and they are not broken — read-aloud science for four to eight, with every source kept on the page where the grown-up can find it.
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The Colours You Cannot See
There are patterns on flowers that your eyes have no part for, and they are really there — read-aloud science for four to eight, with every source kept on the page where the grown-up can find it.
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Bone Song, Read Aloud
Two true things about the bone inside your arm — the read-aloud door into Bone Song, Zine No. 1, which is where the argument lives.
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The Cuttlefish That Can’t See Colour
It matches whatever it sits on, it cannot see colour, and nobody has worked out how — read-aloud science for four to eight, with every source kept on the page where the grown-up can find it.
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The Dog Breathes Out Sideways
A read-aloud about a nose that does not blow the smell away — with something you can try, and every source kept on the page for the grown-up.
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Almost All of It Is Holes
A read-aloud about a seed that flies on the parts that are not there — with something you can try, and every source kept on the page for the grown-up.
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One Ear Higher Than the Other
A read-aloud about a bird whose two ears disagree about up and down — with something you can try, and every source kept on the page for the grown-up.
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It Stays Green, and Then It Goes
A read-aloud about what a leaf actually does in autumn — which is not what anybody thinks — with every source kept on the page for the grown-up.
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Just Right For Whom?
A read-aloud about the warm band around a star, where Earth actually sits in it, and why nothing alive has the same one — with every source kept on the page for the grown-up.
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The Same Four Letters
A read-aloud about the four letters that everything alive is written with, and the one thing about them nobody checks — with something you can try, and every source kept on the page for the grown-up.
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More Than One Way to Spell It
A read-aloud about reading three letters at a time, and finding out that nearly everything has several right spellings — with something you can try, and every source kept on the page for the grown-up.
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The Onion Has More Than You
A read-aloud about a thing everybody says about you that turns out not to work — and what an onion has to do with it, with every source kept on the page for the grown-up.
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Edition One
Seven items filed on institutional press releases, because six publishers refused a direct read that day.