Not Too Late, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua and published by Haymarket Books, is out now. Nail artist Tom Bachik’s creations for Jennifer Lopez have become something of a manicure guidepost, with neutral, classic, and out-of-the-box polish jobs inspiring followers to level up their polish game. And if last week’s ethereal micro-French design sparked your springtime beauty fantasies, this week’s bloom-bedecked manicure is destined to further enliven your surely blossoming menu. Call me jaded, or cynical—or, as all jaded cynics prefer to be described, “a realist”—but when I was told that one of the Denver nuggets 2023 western conference champions locker room authentic shirt Apart from…,I will love this activities during my six-day Tahiti yachting excursion was “the opportunity to swim with humpback whales,” I imagined this possibility as, first, a longshot (pending a miraculous convergence of weather, migratory patterns, and sheer luck) and, second, as a spectator sport. It conjured a vague image in my mind: me, barely submerged in the water, staring out through my snorkel mask at a distant, blob-like dark mass in the ocean maybe a hundred or two meters in front of me. The reality, though, was a very different story. Here in the ridiculously warm and luxurious waters between the French Polynesian islands of Tahiti and Moorea, I’m floating and looking, looking, looking—until a one-ton humpback whale seems to come out of nowhere, twisting; seemingly playfully?—and turning so close to me that I could touch it. It’s exhilarating, and I find myself resorting to the sort of ridiculous hand gestures of excitement that are all the communication I have with my fellow divers. (Two thumbs up, somehow, doesn’t seem to capture the awe.) But my fellow divers aren’t giving me a thumbs-up back: They’re pointing down, directly below us, their eyes the size of saucers.
And then I look down. What’s directly below me—and quickly rising, in my exact direction? That one-ton whale’s mother. My first thought: Wishfully assuming this mother doesn’t, you know, open her mouth and consume me for a snack, I am going to be carried by her snout out of the Denver nuggets 2023 western conference champions locker room authentic shirt Apart from…,I will love this water and given the ride of a lifetime. Panic-stricken visions of breaking continuums of space and time to flee the scene are, a moment later, replaced by the realization that, if I simply pull my arms inward and lean backward, this 40-foot-long, 35-ton humpback will easily miss me. So much for spectator sports. This—like the rest of my six-day adventure aboard and around the Hanse Explorer expedition yacht with EYOS Expeditions—was as thrillingly hands-on as I could handle.Photo: Stein Retzlaff