I’m having trouble with a story. First I went down one rabbit hole (the effects, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the Irish Potato Famine) until it branched into two (now-dead towns, one in Maryland, one in Ireland), and then I went down both. You can picture me heading down one, scrambling back up, […]
Month: June 2016
June 13-17, 2016 Christie thought she was from nowhere–until an internet quiz put her in her place. The novel Frankenstein, Michelle writes, “can be read a warning of the perils of human hubris and a brilliantly imaginative response to a global disaster.” Will we take its lessons and inspiration to heart in the face of our own monstrous creation, climate change? J-Shame: “It hits when your […]
Let me tell you a story. In the summer of 1991, when I was 21 years old, I worked in a genetics lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. I wasn’t yet out, but had heard about a popular gay bar called Heaven in the city’s Montrose neighborhood. When a new friend asked me to […]
I’ve been working on a couple of essays over the last week, knowing I had to fill this space. But when the time came to post one of them, I couldn’t do it. The subject was too irrelevant, too glib in the shadow of yet another sick fuck shooting innocent people. It didn’t belong. This […]
Between two and three o’clock in the morning on June 16, 1816, during a restless night in a villa on Lake Geneva, eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin had a waking dream. As the moon shone through the shutters of her room, she remembered, “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had […]
This post first ran on January 7, 2014. I am from nowhere. Until my husband told me this — stated it as a fact, like “it’s raining” or “the sky is blue” — I’d never had a truthful answer to a question that has always given me pause: where are you from? “You’re from nowhere,” Dave […]
June 6-10, 2016 Rose spends a month on in a ship in the North Sea, and finds herself engaging deeply with issues of scale. A prominent naturalist lives a quiet life in small-town Washington – amassing 150,000 specimens – and his neighbors have no idea who he is until after his death. “There ain’t nothing […]
I keep a wooden box on my bedside table. It’s cheap – an old Yalumba Wine case that I found on a curb somewhere, with a hinged lid and a shred of price tag still attached. Usually, it’s stacked high with magazines half read, a thing seldom opened and often dusty. But in all of […]
