Amanda Hess’ September 26 piece for The New York Times was a brilliant and incisive look at how New York’s (and San Francisco’s, to some degree) pop-up-museum scene serves as a great social-media photo backdrop for the younger set. The story embodied American culture’s preeminent desire to…
I went to a reading the other night for someone I have known for a decade. I call him a friend, but really we are something between Facebook friends and former colleagues who rarely saw each other in person. We have kept in spotty touch, and several times he was…
It is easy not to see the landscape in its entirety, but consider too the manmade—the microwave towers, radio masts, and cell towers rising up stiffly in the fields; the lattice pylons, tube towers, and concrete or wood utility poles that help make our electrical grid “the largest interconnected machine on Earth”; guardrails like staples in a wound; 26 million streetlights vying with moon and stars.
This Friday I will venture to a small southern Missouri town (population 586) named Tecumseh, named after the great Shawnee chief and warrior. Almost every spring and fall, since April 2015, I have packed up my compact car and driven to Ozark County for a writing retreat…
Brace yourself: I have discovered an American middle-class couple who leave their phones on the kitchen table when they work elsewhere in the house or in their yard, and they do not check them when they come back. They also turn their phones off at night, and when they leave…
Beer has been in the news a lot lately, and not just because a particular U.S. Supreme Court nominee may have enjoyed a cold one, or a keg or two, in June 1982. Stanford University archaeologists near Haifa, Israel have discovered humans may have first started brewing…
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” —Dalai Lama This past week has officially been too much. Hearts and minds are weary, and there is a collective need to press the restart button and let go. Remember:…
In just about every measure the American middle- and upper-middle class act like new money. One need only glance at photos on social media that portray consumption and appearance to see that our culture violates all the “golden rules” —if you…
As a survivor of sexual abuse which took part during my high school years, I have dreaded and awaited this Thursday as soon as I knew September 27 would be the day Dr. Christine Blasey Ford would testify. I had just turned 13 years old in October 1991…
NPR ran a story this week on a new “space mining” program at the Colorado School of Mines, which turned out to be misleading. In reality, it is “The first program in the world focused on educating scientists, engineers, economists, entrepreneurs, and policy makers in the developing…