HeyJaredpocketful of 𝛘tals
Minerals interact with everything — environments, living things, ancient oceans, other worlds. I'm a museum curator and scientist who writes about what those interactions reveal.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 2
- Latest publication
- Jul 22, 2026
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- Jul 5, 2026
Latest issues
You Are Not Smelling Rain (opens the original)
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I spent a week in Kauai last month, and it rained almost every day. Not the way it rains in Los Angeles — the halfhearted winter apology that everyone pretends is weather — but real tropical rain, heavy and immediate, the kind that falls from clouds that were never far away to begin with.It didn’t smell like anything.Not nothing exactly. But not what I grew up with in Arizona — the smell that arrives before the storm front does and stops you mid-sentence. That smell has a name, petrichor, that f
Four Nickels (opens the original)
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There’s a case in the Robert Procop Gem and Mineral Hall at NHMLA that I have walked past more times than I could count, and it is, by any honest measure, one of the more dramatic cases we have. It’s called “What Is a Carat,” and it exists to answer a question most visitors don’t think to ask until they’re standing in front of a diamond price tag: what is this unit, and why does it move the number so much?The case answers it the old-fashioned way. On one side, a small brass balance scale holds t
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