The poets tell us that spring is for love. Tomorrow, Ann will tell you it’s for running, jumping, and giving in to hormonal chaos. Where I live, spring is for gambling. I live in the fruit basket of Colorado, in a valley famous for peaches and cherries, and every spring the local orchardists keep a […]
As a freelance writer, I spend a lot of my time in contented isolation. But lately I’ve been appreciating a particular kind of social network. It’s not my intimate circle of family and friends, wonderful though that is. It’s not the choppy, wide-open seas of Twitter and Facebook, though those have their place as well. […]
A few years ago, my neighbor in Colorado decided to learn something about animal rights. I thought this was a pretty interesting project under any circumstances, but it was especially interesting because my neighbor is Michael Soule, the biologist credited with founding the field of conservation biology. Like a lot of conservation-minded scientists, Michael was […]
One of the annoying things about parenting is that experience is always ahead of science: Those of us raising kids today are dealing with circumstances, and dilemmas, that researchers will need years to understand. Maybe that’s why parents fortunate enough to afford iPads are fretting so much about how and how much our kids use […]
Until last week, I’d never heard of the Broomway. Now I long to walk it. The Broomway is a paradox: a path through the ocean, a six-century-old walkway that disappears each day. It begins on the southeastern coast of England and heads straight out to sea, crossing about three miles of sand and mudflats until […]
Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 2 million Cambodians — 20 percent of the country’s population at the time — died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime. Some 17,000 victims were held in the regime’s most notorious prison, a former high school known as Tuol Sleng (“Hill of the Poisonous Trees”) or S-21. […]
Kaneohe Bay, a keyhole-shaped notch on the southeastern shore of Oahu, is known for its placid waters, its coral reefs, and one very large, floating vacuum cleaner. Not long ago, Eric Conklin, marine science advisor for The Nature Conservancy, gave me a tour of the bay in his rubber-sided outboard. We called on a small […]
Sherlock Holmes is having another cultural moment, and as usual, I’m all in. I was raised on the original stories — thanks to a family friend who was a Baker Street Irregular — and this winter, I’ve treated myself to another trip through the canon. This time, though, my sympathies aren’t so much with Sherlock […]