This fall, I brought members of the Oregon Peace Institute to my town to lead an introductory bystander intervention training. The fatal stabbing of two men on a Portland commuter train a few months earlier had hit the community hard—many people had connections to the places and people involved—and I wanted to do something more […]
Month: December 2017
Cagan H. Sekercioglu is one of those people who seem to have more hours in the day than you or I. A biologist who studies birds, mammals, butterflies and also has a sideline in wildlife photography, he divides his time between his native Turkey and the American West, where he is an professor at the […]
Happy 12th month, readers! Lurch with us into December with these fine offerings: On Monday Christie brought back a 2015 essay in which she reminds us that, sure, posting our most enviable moments for all to see is good fun, but it’s way less fun than the actual doing. “When we focus on the rendering,” […]
With International Human Rights Day coming up on Sunday, I’ve been thinking a lot about a Greek economist named Andreas Georgiou. In 2010, Georgiou was living in Maryland and working for the International Monetary Fund when he saw a call for applications for a job in Greece heading a new statistical agency. At that point, […]
On Tuesday, I texted my friend Michelle a brief video clip of a polar bear. The bear is starving, all jutting hips and elbows, its fur sparse except for a thatch along its spine and Clydesdale tufts around its plate-sized paws. As with any bear, there is something disturbingly human about the shape of its […]
On a quiet summer evening in Brighton, Alison Pike was reading to her 9-year-old son the Roald Dahl children’s classic, Danny, Champion of the World—perhaps the most flattering portrayal of fatherhood in literature. Harry turned thoughtfully to his mother. “Sometimes I wish I had a dad,” he said, then paused. “But I’d rather have two […]
UPDATE, 10/27/2020: This post is about, among other things, Peter Ganz, a German philologist with an unlikely personal history. One of his sons, Adam, just wrote telling me about a centenary at Oxford University that celebrates Peter’s accomplishments. I thought you might like to know. I mean, the man left Buchenwald, then helped spy on […]
This post first ran on February 9, 2015, but the message is as relevant as ever. I’d been pondering the consequences of modern self-chronicling when Facebook sent me its rendering of my life in 2014. If Facebook’s Year End Review is any indication, my life boils down to this: adorable dogs, skiing, trail running and mountain […]
