My wife and I were hiking up a pain in the ass desert canyon the other day, hand over hand between bus-sized boulders, no trail to follow, when she said she was done and sat in the shade. She said feel free to poke ahead and when I did, within eyesight of her I found […]
Month: October 2026
Recently, while working through Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy with my mom, I encountered a new-to-me poetic form: the sestina. Jaouad’s book is a collection of creative enticements from writers and artists, musicians and teachers, and we’d come across Ann Patchett’s prompt, “The Mouse Sestina,” in the midst of a particularly hectic time. It was still winter, […]
The other week I was trudging through laps around the court I live on, and a neighbor yelled across the court, first “HI” and I yelled “HI” right back and then he yelled, “THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF THE YEAR!” So I asked why it was the best day of the year, and trudged […]
I recently came across this bucket at one of our local coffee shops — a common drop and collection point for free goods, from books and magazines to excess zucchinis and figs. The bucket and its sign reminded me how much I like this dusty little town and its inhabitants, human and wild. So I called […]
My mother has forgotten she wants to die. For as long as I can remember she has been, not exactly planning it, but asserting her right to control her manner of death. When our family gathered for an Easter lunch during my freshman year of college, I announced that I had received a full scholarship […]
Tomorrow is international jumping spider day, so I’m taking this as an excuse to tell you about one my favorite jumping spiders, Habronattus pyrrithrix. I was introduced to the species while writing a story about the perceptual world of jumping spiders for Science News. I interviewed visual ecologist Nate Morehouse at the University of Cincinnati. […]
Yesterday Francis Halzen received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for overseeing the experiment that detected an extraordinarily elusive subatomic particle via an ingenious reinterpretation of the concept of “telescope.” A version of this essay about that experiment originally appeared here on November 26, 2013, following the announcement of that discovery. The news this past […]
