"The day after the infestation, one flew out of Stone’s hair dryer. A few days later, she pulled a hoodie over her head, then frantically yanked it off again upon discovering multiple stinkbugs burrowed inside. Some time after that, she tacked up a horse she’d been training, jumped on, and immediately sprang back off: stinkbugs were pouring out of every crevice of the saddle. She has flicked them off the pages of books she was reading and pulled their corpses out of her jewelry box; they have crawled across the table during dinner and, drawn to the heat of the water, edged steadily closer to her in the bathtub. As she was telling me her story, one made its way across her cutting board, while another survived a swipe from her kitten."

From "When Twenty-Six Thousand Stinkbugs Invade Your Home/These uniquely versatile bugs are decimating crops and infiltrating houses all across the country. Will we ever be able to get rid of them?" by Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker's "Annals of Ecology."

I love the illustration, by the way, but we did have a conversation about how the image of the bug seems to be merged with an idea of what an African tribal mask looks like and whether that was politically incorrect. There's nothing about Africa in the article. The brown marmorated stink bug — the subject of the article — "is native to China, Japan, the Koreas, and Taiwan. It was accidentally introduced into the United States." Why would you make the invasive nonnative look African?