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.
Science & Nature
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.
How to Meet the Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes
Reverence, serenity, and compassion, courtesy of a mushroom? Well, what would be wrong with that? Humans are a broken species. Negative emotions wired into us for survival have run amok in times we call civilized, and now we hunt, or at least hurt, one another. It would be lovely to think we could all meditate our way to wholeness. But why not speed the process?
And Why Not Look for Mermaids?
Or how the father of taxonomy persuaded the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to organize a hunt for mermaids.
The St. Louisan Who Could Rule the World
Brilliant, he admits to an “almost delusional level of self-confidence.” Will we pay for his recklessness?