This post originally ran in 2013, and issue I address — protecting the anonymity of egg (and sperm) donors — has yet to be resolved. Earlier this year the New York Times ran a story about a woman who had a child thanks to a sperm donor, and then identified that child’s paternal grandmother via […]
Month: September 2019
I dream about books. Not about reading them, or even writing them. I dream, while still partly awake, about stacks of old books being carted off before I’ve had the chance to scour their titles or flip through their pages. I want to know what I’m losing, but there’s no time. I’m grieving. We’d talked […]
Dear readers of Last Word on Nothing: This will be my last post for some time, as I need to buckle down and focus on a book I am writing. The book is about the tricky ethics of our relationships with nonhuman animals in a world massively influenced by human activity. I will miss writing […]
Finding a decent bedtime story to read to your kid is harder than you might think. Most childrens books are either pointless (Superman likes red! Superman likes blue!), overproduced (A book with buttons and recorded dinosaur sounds! Wait, who made these recordings?), boring (Pokey the Bear showed Susie she had the strength the whole time!), […]
Update: this movie, Particle Fever, ended up winning a ton of awards, being shown at a ton of film festivals including Telluride, being reviewed in a ton of surprised and delighted publications including the New York Times, and generally ending up exactly the way you’d want it to. This post ran October 18, 2012, before […]
At 4 am, driving west from Ashland, Wisconsin, I flicked on BBC news and heard a report out of the North Fork of the Gunnison, a place I lived for a couple decades in western Colorado. It was about oil and gas development and the unprecedented rollback of environmental protections. Voices I know from home […]
A version of this post first ran in 2013. In 2006, a puppy came to live on a small farm in Colorado. His name was Oskar, and he was the runt of the litter. Oskar was a playful little guy, but on one fateful autumn day, he would learn that he was living in the […]
