Last Wednesday, I was driving with a couple of friends. We turned onto a road that runs along the lakeshore and gasped. An enormous orange moon hung low over the lake, the bottom rim nearly kissing the water. It looked impossible. “I wish we could pull over,” one of my passengers said. I swerved into […]
Dear readers: Everything is terrible. It feels like the beginning of the end of the world. Or maybe the middle of the end of the world. My brain spends its days vacillating between wild panic and stubborn denial. My denial actually takes the form of obsessive online research, which is why I have wasted approximately […]
For years I’ve been reading about mass shootings. School shootings. Campus shootings. Shootings in bars. Shootings at concerts. Las Vegas. Orlando. Virginia Tech. Sandy Hook. Parkland. The stories keep coming, and each new one elicits horror. We can’t help but be dumbstruck by the senseless carnage. But there’s also some small measure of relief. Not […]
This post originally ran on April 23, 2015. But people are still developing maggot infestations. Yes, even here in the US. So it’s still relevant. Read on and be disgusted all over again. I’m not the kind of girl who ordinarily irons her underwear. But two weeks ago I found myself hunched over a flimsy wooden […]
Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and over again. “The world is at least fifty percent terrible/and that’s a conservative estimate,” Smith writes. Really conservative. Right now, I’d put the number closer to ninety percent. Nearly […]
This post originally ran May 31, 2012. But you won’t even notice. Worm sex is perhaps the most evergreen of evergreen topics. My husband and I often take nighttime walks. On one such walk, I noticed something strange on the ground. It looked like a shiny stick. I leaned in for a closer look and […]
There’s no crying in baseball. There’s no crying at the gym, either. Yet there I was by the slant board with tears streaming down my face. I am an ugly crier. Worse, once I start I cannot stop. My face was turned to the wall, so my instructor hadn’t yet seen the tears. “You’re overthinking […]
This story was originally published in 2013. Since then, evidence for the benefits of fasting has mounted. See here, here, and here. But so many questions still remain. What is clear? Dieting is hard. For example, this study, which examined an every-other-day-fast regimen and a more traditional calorie-restriction diet, lost 31% of its participants. […]