HeyJaredbetween two seas
from an island tucked between the north sea and the atlantic, a weekly newsletter from evolutionary biologist and novelist rebecca hooper, about life and death, land and sea, science, art, and finding joy.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Sep 20, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest issues
a peculiar cousin (opens the original)
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Serendipity. It’s been one of my favourite words since I was a teen. It’s the way it feels in the mouth: the current of it, the liquidity, the little bounce at the end like a lamb’s sudden skip. It just feels good to say, reminds me of the feeling of slipping into cold water, the music of cellos. The meaning, too, is a glorious thing (although I would argue, secondary to the feel of the word): A chance occurrence that leads to something positive. The discovery of penicillin is surely one of the
animal that I am (opens the original)
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Here on the northern-facing bay, the rocks are slanting shelves. Once the bed of Lake Orcadie, they have shifted with every shrug of the earth so that they slope like tired shoulders now, tired with the antics of magma and weather and ocean; tired, especially, with this ocean, this North Atlantic who is young and muscular and takes whatever it is she wants. She has sculpted bowls out of the body of this rock; perfect hollows where soft stone has worn away away away and left deep, still pools. I
mother tongue (opens the original)
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I used to count my steps, measure my heartrate, suspect I was getting sick not because I felt it but because my HR variability dropped. I spent my mornings, over a pre-commute breakfast, looking at metrics of my night: how much deep sleep, how much light sleep, how much REM. I used to count my calories, look at plots of my nutritional needs. I’d crave protein but if my charts said I was eating enough then I’d push that feeling down down down. I used to spend days writing code, six hours on one f
only light (opens the original)
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I wish I could say I had some notion I was being followed—that some ancient sense within told me to stop, to turn around, to search the swallow of blue behind me until I saw the eyes peering back. But no. I had been happily swimming along, scanning the seabed for creatures, running my fingers through mermaid’s tresses1, when my snorkel mask began to fog. I surfaced to clear it, and as I did, I heard a splash behind me—close behind me. But by some origami of logic (that which I fear we are all ve
we are floating (opens the original)
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It is raining, round-bellied summer splotches that are slurped straight up by the soil. We wade through long grass, climb over a barbed wire fence, walk down onto rocks that slope right into the Atlantic. North of here is a great gulp of nothing, a clean stretch of sea right to the arctic. Usually this sea is a fractious thing, but tonight it is calm, lapping rather than thrashing, little dimples where round-bellied raindrops fall.Behind us, in the long grass, stands a man with a telephoto lens.
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