Toes wriggling in warm sand, grass cool underfoot, release from tight suffocating leather… I have always loved being barefoot. In the years when I bothered with pretty shoes, I slipped them off the minute I reached the office. I was nicknamed, no doubt with a few eye rolls, the barefoot contessa, and my […]
The voice comes from over my shoulder, cheery but somehow grating, exhorting me to buy some sort of frozen slurpy drink. It rattles on, touting slurpy wonders, as I try to fill my Mini in peace. Ads that were once trapped inside TVs or stuck to paper now fly through the air, aimed […]
When I think of national parks, I think of craggy iced mountains, hot geysers, and drippy, haunting everglade swamps in a slow canoe. Mike Bezemek, writer and outdoorsman, thinks of mysteries. Some natural—how did an Indiana sand dune swallow a little boy? Some historic, or mythic. And quite a few tinged with sinister […]
I just keep letting my technology fail. Our ancient TV is so blurred, I cannot read the plot summaries from the sofa, and I have to get up anyway, because the remote is not fully functional. My car has gone wonky, so that airbag warnings appear now and then (random, unwarranted) and block […]
After months of deft interrogation and feedback, a friend of mine has his Chat GPT AI trained like Rin Tin Tin, sensitive to his tone of voice, eager to help him think through thorny problems. He sends me one of their conversations—which I promptly misunderstand. Here is an excerpt. First, my friend—who works […]
The Victorians sealed their houses against winter’s bluster, then flung open the windows in spring and aired out all the coal dust, swept out the soot, laundered and pressed the bedlinens, sparkled up the windows, and let the sunshine stream in. The catharsis appeals; the work does not. I tend to befriend our […]
On the campus of Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, you will spot an unusual, beautiful shape in the distance. A geodesic dome, set apart from the main buildings, and somehow beckoning. This is the Center for Spirituality & Sustainability, designed (in partnership with architect Shoji Sadao) by Buckminster Fuller, back when he was on the […]
“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?” […]