When her veterinarian sat her down and said her beloved cat, Stanley, only had a few months to live, Betsy Boyd didn’t bat an eye. She was willing to save Stanley no matter what it took, and in the end the price was $19,000 for a kidney transplant. It was more than a leap of […]
It all started with a 2012 story in The Atlantic with the headline “How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy.” The article introduced a new microscopic boogeyman, Toxoplasma gondii, and explained how Prague-based parasitologist Jaroslav Flegr “began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to […]
Every year after the glow of Christmas subsides, after the trees come down, Bing Crosby stops crooning and the ugly sweaters are tucked away for another year, Americans engage in another time-honored tradition — returning gifts. Americans return more than $70 billion in gifts each year according to Optoro, a “reverse logistics” company that helps retailers manage returns. […]
Nowadays it seems like cats have conquered the world — or at least the internet and our hearts — so in retrospect it’s surprising that despite homo sapiens’ 10,000-year friendship with felis catus, the two species didn’t move in together until the mid-20th century. Sure, writers from Charles Dickens (“What greater gift than the love […]
On a cold March morning in Boston’s West End, a woman was sitting in her second-floor apartment when she saw a light-colored streak zoom down past her window. She ran to the ledge, looked below, and saw a white cat walking off a patch of mulch like it was no big deal. Looking around, witnesses […]
As Texans begin to pick up the pieces of their homes and livelihoods following the unprecedented destruction wrought by Hurricane Harvey, a lone cat has become the state’s unofficial mascot and symbol of resilience in the face of devastation. The photo (above), captured by Getty photographer Scott Olson, has become an instant meme: It shows […]
