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Where are the Caribbean Atolls?

The ring-shaped coral islands called atolls are a defining feature of the South Pacific, put on magnificent display in the recent Disney-Pixar film Moana. Atolls are known for being convenient harbors almost by default, rich habitats for marine life, and the source of the famous stark line between blue-water and green-water regions that surrounds Pacific islands. Atolls are also extraordinarily rare outside of the South Pacific, which is curious, because neither coral nor islands are similarly restricted. Other warm regions should have their own atolls, but they almost always don’t. So the question is…where are the Caribbean atolls?

A ring-shaped island with a shallow lagoon in the interior and deep blue ocean water surrounding. Where visible, the island ring itself is white with greenery.
Atafu Atoll, Tokelau (a dependent territory of New Zealand near Samoa)

It turns out this is a fairly involved question.

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Where are the Caribbean Atolls?

To The Jehovah’s Witness Who Mailed Me a Handwritten Letter Last Week

Dear Gertrude,

I received your letter a few days ago, and have spent the ensuing period formulating a response in my mind. That response is ready now.

How dare you?
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To The Jehovah’s Witness Who Mailed Me a Handwritten Letter Last Week

Octo-Nope: Six Reasons Not To Get A Pet Octopus

If you’re building a marine aquarium and the thought of putting an octopus in it crosses your mind, consider not doing that. Consider not doing that so hard that you put this ill-conceived notion to permanent rest, no matter how much fun Finding Dory made it sound. An octopus makes for a difficult, finicky, and potentially even dangerous marine-aquarium inhabitant, best left to nature and specialists.

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Octo-Nope: Six Reasons Not To Get A Pet Octopus

My Place in the Palms

Images of people in my culture don’t look like me.

There’s a trivial sense in which that’s not true. My dark, angled eyes, curly hair, curvaceous figure, and diminutive stature all betray my origins. Our beauty queens and pop stars in particular look like me, conspicuously lighter in hue than even our own relatives. As distinctive as I always am in family photos, someone else who looked like me would not have seemed out of place.

But the image of us isn’t a scientist. She isn’t an atheist or a socialist. She isn’t dating outside her race. She isn’t deliberately far away from her parents. She isn’t autistic. She isn’t transgender. She isn’t gay.

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My Place in the Palms

For Today I Am a Boy – A Review

There are many little bits and pieces of growing up transfeminine in a hostile world. Recognizing ourselves early as pressed into a gender we neither desire nor understand is not always a blessing, and often merely changes the character of our seeping hurt. Our youthful relationships with boys, our youthful relationships with girls, how we feel about clothing and sport and our parents, all get colored through these lenses, already complicated and made more so by inept striving toward a less horrid vision of the future.

In her novel For Today I Am a Boy, Kim Fu finds them all.

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For Today I Am a Boy – A Review

A Memory of Water – A Jane and Jessie Story

CN child abuse, residential schools

Chandelure followed the sobbing. The lights of the flames on his chandelier-like body made for an obvious approach, even as his ghostly arms and flames left no marks on the wet trees. He paused, reaching the small gap where the sounds began.

The creature resembled a small tree stump with a stubby black body extending from one end. It held its tiny arms up to its wooden face, wracked with its sadness, its tears scarcely noticeable against the chilly damp. Chandelure weighed his options.

A ghost wearing a tree stump as a mask. The ghost has red eyes and tiny hands. The tree stump has branches where the mask's ears would be.
Phantump.

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A Memory of Water – A Jane and Jessie Story