Rachel DuRose

happy international women’s day

merry christmas

Requiem for the Christmas Island Shrew It never weighed more than a spoonful of sugar. Five or six grams of life, soft-furred and sharp-nosed, darting among the roots and leaf litter of a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. At night, its voice—a thin, high cry, part bat and part whisper—once filled the forest of Christmas Island. Now the forest is silent. Australia’s only shrew, Crocidura trichura, has been declared extinct. Few knew it lived, fewer still that it was Australian. The shrew was a stranger in a land of marsupials, a migrant that arrived tens of thousands of years ago, likely clinging to a raft of vegetation from what is now Indonesia. For millennia, it thrived unseen in the island’s rainforest, feeding on beetles and sheltering beneath roots. When British naturalists arrived in the 1890s, they found the forest alive with its shrill chatter. “Extremely common,” they wrote. Within a generation, it was gone. The black rats came first, stowaways in bales of hay. With them came a parasite, Trypanosoma lewisi, that swept through the island’s naïve mammals like a plague. Within years, both native rats were extinct, and by 1908, the shrew too was presumed lost. Its name lingered only in museum drawers and footnotes. Yet it was not quite gone. In 1958, two shrews surfaced as bulldozers cleared forest for mining, seen briefly before being forgotten. Then, in 1984, came a small miracle: a live female, discovered in a clump of fern. For a year she lived in a terrarium, tended by biologists who fed her grasshoppers and hope. Months later, a male was caught—sickly, short-tempered, and dead within weeks. The female lingered alone until she, too, was gone. No others were ever found. Searches in the decades that followed brought only silence—the kind that deepens until it becomes its own proof. In 2025, the Red List made official what many already knew in their hearts: Crocidura trichura was no more. To some, the loss of a creature so small may seem inconsequential. Yet its passing adds one more tally to Australia’s unenviable record—the thirty-ninth mammal species lost since colonization. The shrew’s story is a familiar one: an island undone by rats, cats, ants, and the heedless movement of the world. It asked for little: a patch of soil, a few beetles, a quiet forest. And it leaves behind a silence that, once heard, cannot be forgotten. 💐 Full piece: lnkd.in/gwszmzcf

The paper you weren’t supposed to see: issuu.com/idsnews/docs/i…

RIP Roscoe Hamilton, English Bulldog (9 y/o), Grand Army Plaza, New York, NY • I had the privilege of meeting @LewisHamilton dog Roscoe four years ago, though this is the first time sharing his photographs. Rest easy, Roscoe ♥️

Lost my best friend last night. Thank you all for the love you’ve shown him over the years. Roscoe forever.

"In this man-made famine, Palestinians are starving to death amid the deafening silence of the world, while tonnes of food are going to waste on the Egyptian side of the border while awaiting permission to enter Gaza." — #AJOpinion by Moncef Khane ⤵️ aje.io/p4egjm

we haven’t forgotten btw he should have been fired ages ago

MIT just studied how ChatGPT impacts our brains time.com/7295195/ai-cha…

1. 🩺 Zoom partners with Suki to offer AI-powered medical note-taking: (techcrunch.com/2024/10/22/zoo…) This morning, TechCrunch’s Marina Temkin reported that the video-conferencing company is partnering with the AI medical scribe provider to enhance its telehealth services.

“The secret negotiations to free The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich unfolded on three continents, involving spy agencies, billionaires, political power players and his fiercest advocate—his mom.” wsj.com/world/europe/e…

Breaking: Russia freed wrongly convicted WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich as part of the largest and most complex East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War on.wsj.com/4cheS5q

oh i-

I’m gagged #BelgianGP

“The job search is tough at every point in your life, but the first, post-grad search can be one of the hardest.” Re-sharing the first article I’ve authored at HBR in the hopes it can help some fresh grads!

From me, on my employer (along with many other media companies) licensing content to OpenAI vox.com/technology/352…

So excited to get started soon! 🤩💫