Sometimesin the springout walkingI get the feelthat the earth itself is speaking,that it has its own language,written in ice
Month: March 2021
On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow […]
This post originally appeared in 2012, before advances in artificial intelligence brought the possibility of deep fakes and other ways for storytelling artifacts to lie. Here I looked at the ways in which information can be false, and how we typically only look or check for certain kinds of veracity. Ever since reading the comment […]
The fall of 5th grade, my parents gave me two options: I could either enroll in Chinese school, or join the youth orchestra. I loved playing cello so I opted for the latter, but as an adult, I wonder if I made the right choice. While I have some basic Chinese conversational skills, I didn’t […]
Have you ever dialed a phone number to get the weather forecast? This is one of those questions and answers that dates you, like describing your favorite TV show in adolescence, or the brand of shoes that were extra cool in 10th grade. Dialing a number: There’s the first anachronism in that example. I don’t […]
A little over a year ago I made an unplanned trip to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. I had driven to the city to run errands but then decided to go look at art instead, a moment of pre-pandemic spontaneity that felt indulgent then, and now, I imagine, would feel like intense catharsis. It […]
Here’s something I’ve learned about myself in the pandemic: I open produce bags by licking my fingers. My entire life, after touching the car keys or the inside of the metro, and my shoe, and the cart, and anything else that is around, and before touching my fruits and vegetables, I have been sticking my […]
Our Michelle wrote a book! It’s called Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, and it has already become beloved by the many readers and reviewers who have been talking about it even before the book came out March 9. The book chronicles the history of conservation and conservationists in the U.S., […]
