Back in 2017, I wrote a post debating whether I should have a second child. I almost didn’t. We tried and tried. We even went to a fertility clinic. And then we decided it probably wasn’t meant to be. I was already 40. “Let’s give it two more months and then call it quits,” I […]
Month: May 2023
Jennifer Lunden is the author of the astounding new book American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. She’s also a good friend. This is Part 1 of our conversation about work, exhaustion, and writing while ill. Kate: I know American Breakdown has been a […]
Under a spring sky in the high desert of Western Colorado, we had a little gathering at our house. My wife’s childhood friend, awarded author and translator of Lithuanian poetry Laima Vince, stood on our wooden deck discussing a Jewish poet who was executed along with her family at the age of 19 in 1941 […]
Freshly back from my annual pilgrimage to TED, I’m taking stock of the brain-fizzing input that came my way all week in Vancouver. Each year has its own balance of technology, entertainment and design, and this year all three had a distinctly artificial intelligence flavor. The conference is built on ‘ideas worth spreading’, but the […]
I was in Borneo last fall, in a very wild place called Gunung Palung National Park, following orangutans and macaques and leaf monkeys, oh my. Being around primates is always very exciting, and nobody threw poop, which was a nice change from some primate-viewing experiences I’ve had. And yet, even considering the droopy-cheeked orange apes, […]
The other night I was on a walk and a shrub attacked me. Not an attack, really. We were on the sidewalk and it was claiming part of the airspace above. Of the two of us humans on the walk, I was on the shrub’s side, and the shrub and I had a temporary encounter […]
