“Everything is connected,” we often remind one another, nodding wisely—but with no idea of the implications. Not until the end of the twentieth century did we realize that the immune system’s inflammatory response plays a central role in anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, MS and other auto-immune diseases, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, Parkinson’s, […]
In the only recorded inter-species war in human history, the humans lost. Meet the victor. Skinny, leggy, frizzy-haired and feathered, with a long, pale blue neck, buggy amber eyes, and wings too short to fly. Instead, they flap when the emu runs, spindly legs blurring at thirty miles per hour. Emus may not […]
It starts with a scritching noise that, like a demonic possession, seems to be coming from inside the walls. Then, anticlimax: we find a scattering of dark brown droppings in the bathroom cabinet. We are only dealing with Satan’s small gray minions. Andrew picks up a shredded pile of white cotton: “What’s this?” […]
A quarter-century ago, Wendell Berry suggested that if we aim to rescue our planet, “we are using the wrong language.” Our terms are scientific, expert, analytical—but also cold, and often vague. “As a result we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to ‘save’ a world which their language simultaneously […]
Hobby drones used in warfare have provided something new: a way to track, observe, hary, kill, and record another person being killed, all in one device. Coupled with distribution by social media, videos of these activities are very much like FPS (first-person shooter) games brought into the real world as FPV (first-person […]
A traditional Roman Catholic confessional looks as heavy as sin itself, the dark wood carved deep. You enter and kneel, but the kneeler never has quite enough room for your knees, which throws you off balance from the start. Velvet curtains rustle, then the metal grate slides open: God is listening. God, through […]
Who needs a time machine? I look out the window and see snow falling, and I am five again. Excited as the snow deepens, thrilled (still) to play in it, cozy in front of a fire afterward. The adult in me loves the way snow covers an often ugly world with pure loveliness—white […]
Spoilers throughout. Deserved spoilers, maybe even a tad vengeful, because Playground humbled me on so many levels at once. First and most happily, Richard Powers’s descriptions of the strange, almost unfathomable beauty beneath the sea are the most lyrical and engaging I have ever read. As a boy, he wanted to be an […]
A Sunday school teacher taught me as a child that the Apocalypse would be ushered in by—among other signs—seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls. A newspaper colleague once joked to me years ago that God had traded His seven horsemen for a phalanx of car stereos booming out bass-heavy hip-hop. Both […]
In front of me sits a gorgeous book titled Way Beyond Bigness. It is lush with photos and foldout schematics and a tour de force comparison of the Mississippi, Mekong, and Rhine river basins. Derek Hoeferlin, professor and chair of landscape architecture at WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, pulled […]
