If anyone is handing out alternate lives, I will take Chiara Vigo’s. On moonlit spring nights, she slides a white tunic over her head, murmurs a prayer, and dives into the Mediterranean. Entering a network of underwater caves off the coast of Sardinia, she probes the seafloor for rare, giant mollusks, Pinna […]
Boy, did I get schooled fast. After reading article after article about how we are blasting artificial light into the night sky, erasing stars, confusing plants and animals, and confounding astronomers, I learned that there are now “dark sky” towns dotted around the world. My little town seemed a natural for this project, […]
Thirteen years ago, Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, wrote a book called What Technology Wants. What Kelly wants is a way to combine technology and wisdom, cold machines and a warm Earth. Luckily, he has a genius for the big picture, the sweeping statement, the aphorism. Pushed too […]
What haunts me about the Eliot gravesites at Bellefontaine Cemetery is what is not there, what is missing or muddled or mysterious. Local historian Jerry Garrett and a crew of his smart friends agreed to give me a tour, and I begged them to time it for April. Eliot opened The Waste […]
Last year, Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr bought an old schoolbus and covered it with a handpainted mural, the kind so bright and fun that passersby have to stop to look. Then they took off. Two adults, four kids, and a dog living in this bus for a year, driving all […]
Stroking his soft black curls, I gaze into my standard poodle’s brown eyes and see nothing left of the wolf. Willie would rather surf the counter for snacks than rip apart a lame cow. His ancestors were the wolves who found it easier to hang out with humans and scavenge for […]
“Oh, I never give my social security number,” a friend told me years ago. She grew up ahead of me, in the decade when love was supposed to be free and authority questioned. “When they want my phone number,” she added, “I give my sister’s but change one digit.” I was young, […]
An experience can resonate with you for years, charged with a particular essence you cannot quite name. And then someone tosses off a comment that names this essence so precisely, it stops you mid-sentence. At a dinner party just after St. Patrick’s Day, one of our hosts took the chance to play […]
After years of pushing for changes in our language—and therefore our thought—I am ready to slap (politically incorrect: resort to violence) the next man, woman, or child (politically incorrect: excludes the nonbinary) who suggests a change. I am also furious (a person living with anger) because my annoyance is making me […]
Lord, how I wish I were funny. People who can toss off dry asides or zing a comeback keep our brains happy—and they keep life’s pettiness and drama in perspective. I have always been too Serious. Also too slow. Mine is l’esprit d’escalier, that perfect French phrase for only coming up […]