I’ve done it. I figured out how to eat vegetables. Maybe everyone else figured this out a long time ago. But it took me until this year to figure out how to stuff myself with plant parts all summer long. It’s a two-step process. One, a service. The second, a device on my refrigerator door.
This weekend the movie Ant-Man opened. It’s the latest in the pretty-entertaining crop of movies based on Marvel Comics characters, like Iron Man and The Avengers. I haven’t seen Ant-Man yet. But I’m not going to let that stop me from telling film executives what their next insect-based superhero movies should be. There’s already been […]
Here’s a thing that reliably brings me delight: seeing a bug on a window. I don’t know how this love started. But it’s real. Here’s what happened when I was walking to the water cooler at work the other day. I saw a dark spot on the glass. A step or two more and wings […]
I’m fascinated by those maps of places people have visited. You know the ones. Mine is below. You can make your own to show how much of the world you’ve traveled, or haven’t. There’s an element of bragging – why, yes, I have been to New Zealand, the Middle East, and more than one country […]
I walked along the edge of a cliff. Under my feet, grass. To my right, a hundred-foot drop to the waters of the English Channel. A strong wind blew off the water and over the cliff, blowing the loose ends of hair in my face, obnoxiously. To my left was a field, planted with something […]
About the same time I was laid off from my last magazine job, I found out that I’d gotten a gig in the Bering Sea. A photographer, Chris Linder, had a National Science Foundation grant to go on a series of voyages to very cold places and he needed a writer to go with him. […]
I got to know Jennifer Holland when I started working down the hall from her at National Geographic. My tenure there was brief and deskbound. Jenny, on the other hand, is the kind of writer who travels the world to get up close to adorable nudibranchs and terrifying dragons. Then she puts the words together […]
In the past half year, I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve always traveled a lot. Until recently there’s been a heavy emphasis on longer trips: going to live in a foreign country or hang out on a ship for a few weeks or months. In the five and a half years I was freelancing, time was […]