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Friday Slide Show: Miniature Sea Shells
2 October 2026
One of the problems our double vision visits on us is a tendency to knock things over. These targets we reach for are generally not as near or far as we perceive them to be.
That can be amusing when we try to pour a glass of wine at the dinner table. We're careful to grasp the bottle safely but the glass is never as near or far as we think. So the tablecloth gets soaked.
But mainly we knock things over. And one of those things a while ago was a small vase full of miniature sea shells. As we put them back in the clear glass vase, it occurred to us they would make an interesting macrophotography challenge.
The challenge would be to get close enough to take in their beauty and clever engineering, which is often just too small to appreciate. And, at the same time, to illustrate just how small they are.
So we wanted to enlarge them but also to show their small size.
We come up with harmless little projects like this to avoid knocking things over in the house. Keeps us busy.
We stewed about this for weeks. Months, probably. Time flies when you're having fun, after all.
Then the other day, a friend recommended Climate and Punishment by Gabriel Winslow-Yost in the New York Review of Books. It's a review of George Saunders' novel Vigil, which we had both read.
The first paragraphs of the review confused us, though. They had more to do with climate science than empathy, which is what we took from the novel. Why was the guy writing about climate change?
We'll find out later when we read the thing. But we were immediately knocked over ourselves by the idea that a column or two of type would solve our challenge. We could show the little shells up close and you could tell how small they are by how large the type appeared.
We don't know anything about shells except they all housed some soft-bodied marine animal once and some of them have two halves while others are more like a snail's shell. There are some of each in the slide show.
We don't know how they ended up in our house, either. Our best guess is that Joyce used to collect them when she lived a couple of blocks from Ocean Beach 51 years ago.
However they got here, they are here now, kept in a glass vase at a height short enough to intrigue small children. Which, if we are not careful, we could easily knock over.
