Seaweed is going to save us all, plus it makes clouds and might just be the reason George Eliot started writing novels. For The Believer

This summer I got to write about seaweed for The Believer — you should subscribe to read more in the magazine (and because The Believer is one of the finest magazines you can read and it needs your support).

Picture George Eliot: long face, long nose, dressed as a man. She and her common-law husband, George Lewes, are both in “a wide-awake hat” and “an old coat, with manifold pockets in unexpected places, over which is slung a leathern case, containing hammer, chisel…” They also each wield two knives, and wear “trousers warranted not to spoil.” It is the summer of 1856, on the craggy Devon coast, and Eliot has recently adopted Lewes’s surname. Together, they haunt tide pools, and Eliot discovers the “difference … between having eyes and seeing.” They “scramble,” she writes, over a shoreline that is “nothing but huge boulders and jutting rocks.” Here, she falls in love. “Quite in love,” she puts it, “with sea-weeds.” She adds, “I shall never forget their appearance…  the dark olive fronds of the Laminariae.”

Me too, with the same seaweed: Laminariae digitata—kelp.