Last time I was in my hometown of Seattle, I walked by the movie theater I worked at for many years in the 1990s and 2000s and found it permanently closed. Being sad and angry about changes in Seattle is kind of a thing, but I wasn’t just upset about a piece of the city–and […]
Art
Once upon a time there was a fossil seller and paleontologist named Mary Anning. In the early 19th century, she and her brother found the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton. In the early 21st century, we immortalized her in marshmallow form. Presenting Mary Anning, Paleontolopeep: A diorama by Joanna Church, Helen Fields and Kate Ramsayer. Mary […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about Ursula Le Guin since her death on January 22. Here in the Pacific Northwest, she was not only a beloved author but a beloved public figure, active in the Portland community until the very end of her long life. I’ll miss hearing her voice, and I’ll miss her sharp […]
I’m writing this from a traffic jam on I-95. When we were choosing days on the schedule for Eclipse Week, nobody wanted the responsibility of writing a post the day of the eclipse. Because I have an overactive sense of duty, I signed up for this post, then joked that I’d be writing it on […]
It’s not obvious how to draw a snake. Here, let Isabel Cooper tell you about it, in a 1924 article she wrote for The Atlantic Monthly. For instance, there’s no such thing as a school of snake artists, so when the problem of making a portrait of a snake presented itself I had to think […]
My 2014 foray into drawing – which you can read about below – ended like the others. I got frustrated by my limited skills and gave up. Then in January 2016 I got sick of giving up on stuff I’m not very good at and started drawing every day. You can see the fruits of […]
A treasure hunter recently died near the Rio Grande in New Mexico. His body turned up in the backcountry after he was reported missing. This is the second death of a treasure hunter looking for an ornate bronze chest said to be hidden somewhere between Santa Fe and Canada by multi-millionaire artifact collector Forrest Fenn. […]
The internist I’ve been seeing my entire adult life recently retired. This essay, which originally appeared here in 2014, was not about her. But it did concern the sometimes—maybe always—precarious relationship between medical professional and medical naïf, one that I will now need to renegotiate with a new internist while bearing, believe me, this experience in […]