People are weird about bugs
We name them after saints. Turn them into movie monsters. Build festivals around them. Recruit them to fight agricultural pests. Sell them as jewelry. Teach children songs about them. And kill enormous numbers of them without giving it much thought.
I write about why we do that.
History, but with Bugs
Insects have shaped our horror, folklore, history, and popular culture.
History, but with Bugs explores why and how.
History, but with Bugs is where I write about the strange ways insects and other arthropods show up in human history and culture—from folklore and religion to horror movies, festivals, advertising and popular culture.
Sometimes that means digging through nineteenth-century newspapers. Sometimes it means watching giant ants destroy Los Angeles. Sometimes it means driving to southeastern Colorado to hang out with tarantulas.
God’s Little Beast
A Cultural History of the Lady Beetle
Lady beetles are among the world’s most beloved insects. We’ve named them for the Virgin Mary, turned them into children’s rhymes and good-luck charms, prescribed them as medicine, recruited them for biological warfare against agricultural pests, worn them as jewelry—and occasionally found ourselves buried under billions of them.
God’s Little Beast traces the surprisingly strange cultural history of the little red beetle almost everyone thinks they know.