“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, ” and go till you come to the end; then stop.”

— From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

Friends, this is the end: I’m retiring Distances Between Ports. Fortunately, it’s also the beginning: I’m launching The Science Essayist.

Eventually the archives of this site will probably move somewhere else, but for now they remain, and I thank you with all my heart, readers-mine, for being my companions here these past five years— you know who you are. I really hope you’ll follow me where I go next.

What it is like, you see, is that feeling you get when you have—through several fluctuations of decision and neglect—let your hair grow too long, and it has taken to curling over your ears in a way that you dislike, and scratching the back of your neck so that you are never cool even when the wind kisses past. Dull and dry because it is not only dead now but old, too, it hangs heavy on your person like something you begin to want desperately to lose.

It’s not hard to fix that feeling. You just have to be brave, find a pair of scissors, and snip.