Author: Sofia

  • Closing the Comma on Period Poverty

    Sofia Perez There is a moment every female-bodied tween dreads- the day your sporadic, temperamental period comes early and you’ve forgotten your pad. You’re stuck in the bathroom stall on a muggy summer afternoon in the middle of French and you know your only option is to stuff toilet paper into your panties and say…

  • A Tale of Toxineering & Tarantulas

    Sofia Perez The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in Kings’ palaces. Proverbs 30:28 After defending the bad press snakes get in Western culture and highlighting the potential their venom offers the field of medicine, I was struck by a dagger of guilt. More than 220,000 species- or approximately 15% of all animal…

  • Life, Death & Drugs: Why We Need Venom In Medicine

    By Sofia Perez Once bitten by a snake, one is scared all his life at the mere sight of a rope. Chinese Proverb There is something deliciously poetic about using an agent of death to heal. I fell in love with the idea recently, a seductive tango between danger and relief. Venom- a killer and…

  • Sorry to Snakes: The Good, The Bad & The Truth 

    Sofia Perez I have always been in love with paradoxes, from simple ones like Jumbo Shrimp, to the deepest philosophical questions of human nature, to the poor life- or death, or both- of Schrödinger’s cat. Recently I have invited a new conundrum into my heart’s library of contradictions: ethnoherpetology, which is the study of the…

  •  Recycling Plastic: A Shameful Sham

    Sofia Perez Today is the day in which I dispel lies with a righteous sword of truth. Here goes nothing: The institution of Recycling is a Sham. Now before you storm off angrily and tattle on me to Greta Thunberg, first read my article Greta Thunberg’s Got It Wrong…But We Can’t Get It Right Without…

  • Detergent Diaries: What Can The Ancient Romans Teach Us About Laundry?

    By Sofia Perez Featuring Ancient Rome It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of cleanliness, it was the epoch of dirtiness, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it…

  • Greta Thunberg’s Got It Wrong…But We Can’t Get It Right Without Her

    By Sofia Perez Outrage is a gritty and relentless pandemic, necessary yet temperamental, and easily carried past its usefulness. Make no mistake. I believe in the power of outrage. However, I also believe it must be tamed. It draws attention, but what use is attention without a plan by which to solve a problem? This…

  • The Joy of Words & Food

    Sofia Perez I want to have something to say. But what is something-to-say? It’s that thing we only allegedly earn once we have a Phd in astrophysics, have wrestled five tigers with only one arm, have skipped seven grades for being a child prodigy, have survived world wars, or lived shipwrecked on a tiny island…

  • What if we spoke Hawaiian?

    Sofia Perez I vividly remember the first garden that was truly mine. It was a rectangular wooden planter that was situated in the back of my grandmother’s backyard, right in front of this peach-pink wall and to the right of the thick trunk of a palm tree. It contained lavender, blueberry, basil, rosemary, and a…

  • Aloha in Agriculture

    Sofia Perez Now at the midpoint of my month-long dabble with Hawaiian, several delicate linguistic idiosyncrasies have come to my attention. Firstly there are the grammatical differences between a Polynesian language and a eurocentric one, from the way verbs wrap around nouns to the way letters- many of which are vowels- interact with each other…