First Impressions

The Face: A Cultural History by Fay Bound-Alberti delves into the belief that someone’s appearance can reveal what kind of person they are. King Richard III is a good example. There was a Tudor tradition that portrayed Richard as cruel and corrupt and his unusual body became part of that image. Richard actually had scoliosis, but later descriptions exaggerated his appearance, connecting physical difference with moral ugliness. Unflattering portraits of him painted his personality as ruthless, as if a tight mouth or severe expression could somehow confirm that he was evil.

Anne Boleyn’s story shows how controlling a face could also mean controlling someone’s reputation. After Henry VIII executed her in 1536, her portraits were removed and destroyed. No verified portrait painted during her lifetime survives today. Later images were created from earlier likenesses or descriptions, while stories about her appearance became increasingly hostile. One famous claim that she had six fingers appeared years after her death. Her physical appearance became part of the argument over what kind of woman she had been.

First impressions are strong and long lasting. We still describe people as looking trustworthy, intimidating, innocent, arrogant, or suspicious within seconds of seeing them. A face gives us clues about details such as expression and approximate age, but it cannot reliably reveal whether someone is honest, cruel, intelligent, or morally good. These judgments feel instinctive. Centuries of portraits, stories, and theories about faces have taught us to search for character in appearance. Richard III and Anne Boleyn show how powerful that assumption can become when a superficial image starts to shape the story we tell about the person behind it.

The Field Museum

One of my favorite parts of the Field Museum in Chicago was the exhibit on human evolution. I had learned about hominids before, but seeing their skeletons next to reconstructions of what they may have actually looked like made them feel more real. Instead of seeing human evolution as a line of names and dates, I could actually compare differences in bones, faces, and tools over millions of years.

One of the first displays that caught my attention was Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis. The museum has a replica of her partial skeleton, which looks surprisingly incomplete compared with how much scientists have learned from it. Her pelvis and legs show that she could walk upright, while her long arms and curved fingers and toes still show adaptations for climbing trees. I found it interesting that behavior can be preserved in bones even millions of years later. As hominids spent more time on the ground, later species developed proportions better suited for walking and running, including longer legs and shorter arms.

The skulls also show how diet affected evolution. The robust australopithecines had huge back teeth, wide cheekbones, and large areas for attaching powerful chewing muscles. “Robust” refers mostly to their faces and teeth, not to them having larger bodies. These features helped them process tough, fibrous foods. On the other hand, gracile australopithecines had less extreme chewing adaptations and could eat a more varied diet. It was amazing how scientists could determine their possible diet based on the shape and unique features of the skulls.

Another display shows Turkana Boy, one of the most complete early Homo erectus skeletons ever found, next to a lifelike reconstruction. His species is generally considered the first human species to spread beyond Africa. The Field Museum often places bones next to detailed models. I liked being able to move back and forth between them and see how artists and scientists turned evidence from a skull into an actual face. The reconstructions made the fossils seem less like museum objects and more like individuals who once existed.

One of the coolest exhibits was a display of tools that went from oldest to most recent. The earliest tools are relatively simple cores, flakes, and large handaxes. Later tools become smaller, more specialized, and much more precise. People learned to prepare a stone core so they could strike off a flake with a planned shape, then attach points to wooden shafts or create specialized scrapers and awls. Smaller tools were not simply miniature versions of older ones. They could be made for particular jobs and combined with other materials, which made them more useful and efficient.

The change in size and shape of the tools is probably also related to how the hand and fingers evolved over time to allow for more fine control. Seeing all of those changes next to each other made human evolution feel less like one sudden transformation and more like millions of years of small changes piling up. Each skeleton is not just a scientific specimen. The facial constructions make each skeleton come alive so we wonder who they were, what their lives were like, and what stories they hide. 

Pokémon Fossil Museum

One of the coolest things about the Field Museum is their Pokémon Fossil Museum which was part of a Pokemon event in Chicago. The problem was getting tickets for it. When we first checked online, the tickets were sold out for months. So, we got regular tickets to the Field Museum instead because there were still tons of cool exhibits to see. The day before our actual Field Museum ticket day, though, we went over to the museum along the beautiful lake path. In Pokémon GO, there is a special Pikachu wearing an excavator costume that you could only catch a certain number of times each day, and I wanted to catch as many as possible. I could only catch it if I am physically at the museum. While we were standing on the steps in front of the museum, we decided to drop in and ask if they had any Pokémon Fossil Museum tickets available in person. Shockingly, they had a few tickets for the last entry time the next day! We were so excited and bought the tickets immediately. 

I have played Pokemon Go for almost six years, so getting a Pokémon that was exclusive to the museum made the visit feel even more special. The amount of details in the game were amazing because there were Rock-type and fossil-related Pokémon spawning around the Field Museum that appeared inside the exhibit as skeleton models. As soon as I opened the game up, Pokemon like Kabuto, Archeops, Aerodactyl, and more spawned everywhere. When I went into the exhibit, I saw models of those Pokemon’s fossils. Having the experience be both in game and in real life was amazing. 

The exhibit also did a really good job connecting Pokémon to actual paleontology. Instead of only displaying Pokémon models, it compared them with the prehistoric animals that influenced their designs. Kabuto, for example, has features similar to horseshoe crabs and other ancient arthropods. Archeops is connected to Archaeopteryx, an early feathered dinosaur with features associated with both non-avian dinosaurs and modern birds. I also liked that the exhibit treated the Pokémon almost as if they were real organisms. Their skeletons were displayed like actual fossils. A Pokémon design normally just looks like a cool creature, but putting its skeleton beside a real fossil encourages you to think about why its body has that shape and what kind of animal could have inspired it.

I went to the exhibit because I was excited about Pokémon, but what surprised me was how naturally the real paleontology fit into it. The Pokémon made me pay closer attention to the fossils, and the fossils made me notice details in Pokémon I had seen for years without thinking much about where their designs came from.

USA Triathlon National Championships

Last summer, I competed in the Culpeper Triathlon and placed 3rd in my age group. While winning a bronze medal was amazing, the best surprise came a couple weeks later. I got an email inviting me to compete in the USA Triathlon National Championships in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in August of 2026. I started training for the competition in late spring by running and biking along with my swim practices.

Some days were rewarding, while others were much less satisfying. There were swim practices I barely made it through, steep hills I had to bike over, and runs that left me sore all over. The most challenging part was working on my endurance. My runs couldn’t just be 3 miles, even though the run portion of the triathlon was 3 miles. Since the run comes after 10+ miles of biking, I had to account for how tired I would be, leading to 5-6 mile training runs. Over time, I started to notice improvements. I became more comfortable with pacing myself and trained hard by running on routes with hills.

Competing at Nationals in Milwaukee was different from any triathlon I had been to before. The sheer number of competitors was amazing. I met many young competitors like myself. Many competitors started as swimmers just like me. Before the race, I was nervous, but I had fun chatting with the other competitors and shared stories about how we trained and prepared for the competition.

The race itself was difficult, especially because there were details about the course that weren’t obvious on the map. I hoped that the water in Lake Michigan would be cleaner and cooler than the Potomac River near my house. But, the minute I jumped into the water, I immediately realized the water was so cloudy I couldn’t even see the swimmers right next to me! Nonetheless, it was very exciting to swim against so many amazing athletes! The bike route was along the beautiful lake. The hardest part was a surprisingly steep highway ramp that seemed endless as I pedaled my bike up.

By the run, I was hot, tired, and hungry, but I knew I had to give it my all. My swim coach’s words replayed in my mind throughout the run. He always said that if you were going all out at the finish, you didn’t put in enough effort in the middle of the race. Needless to say, I definitely gave the race my all. Crossing the finish line was surreal as I got my medal and had water shoved into my hands. Simply qualifying for Nationals was amazing, but the most important part of the experience was learning that improvement is gradual. I would love to compete again next year!

Facehood

           For much of human history, people did not think of their face very often. This was because people did not constantly see detailed images or reflections of themselves. You could go through your whole day without seeing a glimpse of your own face. Portraits were only available to the wealthy. Having a painting of yourself meant establishing your status and legacy. An exact likeness was not something everyone could easily create and share every day. 

As mirrors became cheaper and more widely available, this all changed rapidly. Suddenly, people could study their own faces much more closely and much more often. The face became something you could examine, judge, and think about as part of your identity. In The Face: A Cultural History, Fay Bound-Alberti connects this shift to what she calls “facehood,” the idea that one unique face belongs to one individual person and can represent who that person is.

Photography pushed facehood even further. A painted portrait took time and money. A photograph could be produced cheaply, copied, and shared. Your face could now exist in places where you were not physically present. It could identify you, preserve you, and be seen by people you had never met. Bound-Alberti describes photography as helping to “democratize” facehood because ordinary people could now create lasting images of themselves too.

The face started carrying information far beyond simple recognition. It could affect how attractive, respectable, trustworthy, or even memorable someone seemed. That way of thinking still shapes modern life. Cameras, social media, facial recognition, and filters all depend on the widely accepted belief that the face is something worth capturing, studying, and interpreting.

Fish Fossils

During my time at Yale, I visited the Peabody Museum and a certain fossil exhibit caught my eye. The fossil was a large palm frond surrounded by fish, all preserved together in a massive slab of stone from Wyoming. The leaves stretched across the rock while the fish appeared to swim around them. It was fascinating that so many fish died so close to the plant. It made me wonder what had happened that caused the fish to die and whether the palm frond was part of the fish’s habitat or home. What surprised me most was how close the fossil had been found to the site I had visited. 

On a family vacation to Yellowstone, I had the chance to travel back in time through fossil digging at the Green River Formation near Kemmerer, Wyoming. I was so excited, imagining that I would crack open rocks and find fish skeletons everywhere. Instead, I learned that I was not old enough to dig at the main fossil site. While my brother happily started digging with my dad at the quarry, I searched through a peripheral area that had already been excavated. The most promising slabs had been broken apart, leaving behind small piles of loose rock. I picked through them anyway, turning over pieces and smashing them with a little hammer. At the time, I still had delusions of success and piles of fish fossils.

After all that searching, the only fossils I found were small pieces of fossilized fish poop, also known as coprolites. They were not exactly the discoveries I had pictured. My brother across the canyon was swimming in fish fossils while I was swimming in their poo. It was no surprise that the fossils we wrapped up and took home were his. The fish now sit framed in my family’s house.

Seeing the museum fossil changed the way I remembered my trip. At the time, I thought I had been unlucky because I had not found a complete fish. Now I know that scientists have used feces to discover amazing things about prehistoric animals. Their poo contains details about their diet and their environment, facts that just a skeleton would not be able to provide. Seeing the dozens of fish frozen in time at the Peabody Museum was a reminder that fossil hunting is not only about finding the most beautiful object. It is about collecting small pieces of evidence, even something as unimpressive as fossilized poop, and using them to imagine a world that no longer exists.

The Peabody Museum

During my time at Yale, I visited The Human Footprint exhibit at the Yale Peabody Museum. The exhibit focuses on how humans and their environment have shaped each other over millions of years. It presents human evolution as a complicated process involving many species, tools, environments, and extinctions. The gallery has replicas of early human fossils and animals our ancestors interacted with. Human evolution isn’t a linear process, it’s composed of many different adaptations appearing in response to our environments.

One part of the exhibit that stood out to me was how much scientists could learn from physical evidence. A skull or tool may seem small, but the details reveal how ancient humans lived. Early human relatives developed traits like walking upright, making tools, and having larger brains, but these adaptations did not appear at the same time. The stone tools were especially interesting because they showed that technology has been part of human survival for millions of years. Today, technology is represented by phones or AI, but the earliest technology was a sharpened stone. Technology has always been a way humans adapt.

The Human Footprint also showed that survival was never guaranteed. Some human relatives lived for millenia but eventually died out. A trait can be useful in one environment but when conditions change, that trait can be disadvantageous. The exhibit connects this idea to the present by diving deeper into how humans are still changing the world. The gallery includes examples like humans contributing to the extinction of giant moa and agriculture changing the genetics of corn. Visiting the exhibit helped me understand human evolution as a story of adaptation to environments. Like Darwin’s observations of small differences in organisms, the exhibit showed that science begins with paying attention to details.