Touch is how we show our most loved people our care. A medium beyond words to say, I hear you; I’m here for you. One of the cruelest things about this highly contagious virus now sweeping the world is that it steals this language from us when we most need it. Our breath, our hands […]
Month: March 2020
Day 111 a.m. Dear Diary, Well, the freezer and pantry are PACKED! I have enough frozen spinach and canned beans to last me into the next century. Time to settle in for the long haul! 2:00 p.m. I could swear I bought way more coffee than this. 4 p.m. Heading to 7-11 for stringcheese and […]
On November 6, 2015, when this was originally published, I had just arrived back from the most bizarre trip my work has ever taken me on–and I’ve been on some pretty weird reporting expeditions. It was my first (and probably last) experience of being a royal guest in a place where royalty really runs the […]
A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile. -Shakespeare, The Winters Tale I still am learning how to behave during a pandemic. Some things are simple: I know that I should wash my hands frequently with soap for at least 20 seconds. I know that I should cancel my social […]
On March 1st, I got concerned enough to start asking a few beloved elders if they had two weeks of supplies. (They did.) The next day, I stopped touching my face. Last week, I stopped going to restaurants. Monday, when I left the office for my two regular work-from-home days, I thought I might not […]
I know it’s not Friday, and we don’t really do a lot of penis posts any more. But I felt like with all the uncertainty in the world, I really wanted to revisit this post about alligator penises. It first ran in 2013. The alligator harvest at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge happened every September, so […]
By the time you finish reading this paragraph, somewhere in America, someone — a long-haul trucker cruising a lonely highway in Iowa, a soccer dad piloting his Subaru through the Virginia suburbs, a lawyer commuting to her office in Atlanta or Bismarck or Madison — will have hit a white-tailed deer. Since the mid-20th century, […]
Several years ago the Economist published a chart for American expats in the UK. It disambiguated what British people say from what Americans hear them say. For example, “you’re very brave” does not mean “I think you are brave” when a Brit says it. It is more likely to mean “you are insane.” I had […]
