"The week before my son flew across the country to start university in Nova Scotia, I found myself spewing advice at breakneck speed. A quick stop at the ATM triggered sage wisdom about investing for the future and how to avoid credit card debt. The grocery store elicited reminders about buying in bulk and the current state of play around sell-by dates. “Be gentle with yourself. Keep in touch with your sister. Brush your teeth!” Into one long weekend of errands and packing, I condensed 18 years of parenting dogma..."

"When I was in university, a pub owner offered me a job as bouncer. He reasoned that folks would be less likely to get into a brawl with a friendly female than they would a large hairy bloke. Always a sucker for a social science experiment, I gamely took the job. One black eye and a wrenched shoulder later, I quit. What my boss and I hadn’t fully appreciated is that by the time a person needs to be removed from a bar, his or her capacity to discriminate who is doing the removing has vanished. When the urge to fight erupts, any target will do..."

"Digital technology is profoundly changing what we know about plants and animals. Only recently, with the advent of miniature on-board tracking technologies, tiny enough to travel on the back of a bee, can scientists follow individual animals across the ocean floor, along sidewalks, or through the clouds, and with the astonishing precision required to witness the intimate insights of their everyday lives. This new wild world is not the passive, subservient, humans-at-the-top version we grew up with. It is a world where humpback whales use their social networks to improve their populations’ recoveries and mother trees distribute their energy across their root networks to improve the resilience of the forest."

"It’s midday and Taylor Chapple, a new father, is at work. He hears an email alert and glances at his iPad. The tracking device he put on Tom is working well; he’s just where Chapple expects him to be. Chapple has no way of knowing how Tom feels about being tracked, but he is not concerned about overstepping the bounds of privacy..."

"The sea otter raises her stone. The muscles in her forearms tense under the weight. With a single motion she hammers the rock down. Once. Twice. Crack! Bits of soft meat glisten as they fly free from the battered snail shells. The otter scoops up the flesh and devours the tasty morsels. As a baby she learned to use rock tools from her mother, just as her mother—and all the mothers before her—did. Her technique, refined over the years, enhances her capacity to crack even the toughest snails. With a twist of her nimble body, the otter flips and dives. The ocean washes away all traces of the rock, the shell, and the feast..."