I don’t know how I managed to not know this for my whole life, but here it is: the Americas were the last continents to have people on them. By around 30,000 years ago, all the other continents had people on them. We didn’t have any people. Nobody. Empty of people. Why not? How do […]
Ann
I have had occasion to mention January before, once with hard eyes and grit and once with faith and hope. I mean, it needs both, doesn’t it. Another option is always to become one with the cold, dark skies. You finally get through the infinite holiday season, think you can relax for a minute, and […]
I’ve been interviewing an archeologist who’s famous for “sticking close to the data,” that is, not saying anything he can’t back with actual evidence. Reminding me of what I learned in my first year as a junior high school teacher: don’t make threats you can’t carry out, and that’s not as much a digression as […]
I’ve written books and didn’t find the experience pleasant: I’d go underground for 2 or 3 or 4 years, maybe 5, and when I’d stick my head up into the light of the world again, the world was changed. Like, during one of my underground sessions, the internet took hold and when I surfaced, the […]
Some smart cookie timed the release of the movie about Robert Oppenheimer to the week of the anniversary of Trinity, the first test of the first nuclear weapon. (Another smart cookie threw in the release of a Barbie movie and a notable Barbenheimer genre was born, but that’s not what this post is about right […]
I’m not sure why I’m interested in what people change their minds about – maybe because I’m at the age where a person looks back and wonders what the hell that was all about. Like, a person of a certain age tries to find the through-lines of life and sees how many of them just […]
Profiling someone who is widely and wildly admired is harder than it ought to be. The word, hagiography, is not a compliment. What’s wrong with an objective profile of someone who’s practically a saint? I still don’t know. These two people here have since died and the world is less shiny for their not being […]
I grew up sewing most of my own clothes and developed an abiding and expensive fixation on beautiful fabric. Once I was in Florence at a store buying fabric, textiles (tessuti), as a gift for my mother. I stipulated in toddler-Italian a light wool (leggera lana) in blue (blu) for a dress for my mother […]