Ritalin Works–But Not the Way We Thought
ADHD, sleep deprivation, amphetamines and the truth of why they work.
Science & Nature
A Healthy Home Should Not Be a Luxury
Another fluffy news release about home interiors. I move to delete it—but the backstory catches me. An interior designer who had to tear apart her own home because her toddler was struggling to breathe? She wound up a certified expert in home wellness because…
The Storms of St. Louis and the Shelter We Need for Them
Snow fell with the confidence of something that knew it would be felt. Streets emptied. Sound dulled. The city became a held breath between east and west, a place where movement slowed because it had to. There was nothing especially dramatic about this at first. Just cold. Just accumulation.
Coming to Our Senses
We live in a sensory desert in which rooms are deodorized, soundproofed, and painted in neutral colors. But “sensehacking" can transform experience.
The Call of the Wild
More than ten thousand species are now critically endangered. Humans have clear-cut forests, paved grassland, overharvested, overfished, and overhunted. Much of the existing ground is being strangled by honeysuckle, kudzu, vetch, cheatgrass, and various exotics. Can we get a second chance?
The Clash of Perspectives About the Long and Short of Reality
While Edward McPherson does not fully explain his original intent, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View ends up being a work of mixed creative nonfiction modes (personal essay, immersion, travel, speculative CNF), reportage, and warning, all built on the motif of gaining elevation to see beyond our everyday ken—an ambition that comes at a price.
Cast Your Fate to the Wind
Wind itself can drive you crazy. Sometimes there is a hysteria to it, a shrill tirade that goes on for days, relentless, unappeasable. Sometimes it is angry, as though Zeus sucked in his breath to roar at us. Invisible and unpredictable, wind can stroke us with a lover’s tenderness in the morning and topple our home that afternoon.
Giant City and the Emotions Attached to a Home Biome
How do we get a home biome? By breathing the petrichor, I suppose, breaking out from poison ivy year after year, tasting the dirt and water on our lips, scraping our skin on scrambles, getting local minerals and bacteria in our bloodstream, leaving our sweat on the rocks. Maybe the cells we leave, and what we take with us, give us quantum pairing with these places.
My Mother the Griefbot
Do we want to bring our loved ones back?
Your Therapist Could Use Some Help
And our choice of words reveals us.