Drawing For My Nerves

I have a tendency to worry. When I’m stressed, I can worry pretty much any time of day, but my brain’s favorite time to worry is in the middle of the night. At 3 a.m., there is no problem that can’t be mulled over, chewed on, and puffed up until it seems like the biggest […]

Guest Post: Wax Work

I took my place at the gray table in the gray, poorly-lit room, meeting the gaze of the eyeless skull staked upright before me. A stiff rectangular block of white wax was my only material, and a simple metal implement, sharp like a scalpel on one end and rounded like a spoon on the other, my only tool—other […]

Toward a Unified Theory of Poohsticks

By the time it arrived at the edge of our campsite, the stream had grown up so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. It was still clear and shallow, but […]

Guest Post: Moire in the Wild

My first sighting of one of life’s everyday astonishments was as a little fellow in the 1960s, sitting unbuckled in the back seat of my family’s ’57 Chevy. Whenever we hit the highway on our way to the Jersey shore or the Lower East Side of Manhattan where my grandparents lived, we would approach and […]

This is what it sounds (looks) like

I’m a recent convert to Instagram as my main form of social media. After spending a lot of the day reading and writing, listening and talking, sometimes I just can’t take any more words. Facebook sometimes seems too complicated, Twitter too fast—but looking at images feels restful. I’ll follow most anything—photos of kids, vacation scenery, […]

How I Won the Internet and Brought Joy to Peepdom

Last week, I was famous on the internet…for dressing colorful marshmallow bunnies in cravats and spreading them to the enthusiastic fans of a hit Broadway musical. My friends and I made Hamilpeep. Perhaps your cousin shared it with you? Hamilpeep was our entry into the Washington Post’s annual Peeps diorama contest, in which readers are […]

Drawings of Drawings of Lions

Early in the 17th century, two lions lived in the zoo in Ghent. Their names were Flandria and Brabantia. There were probably other lions nearby. Archduke Albert and his wife, Isabella, ruled the region, now in Belgium, and they had a menagerie at their palace. Having a menagerie was the sort of thing extremely wealthy […]

Give a Science Writer a Stage

The Devil had two tattooed women in tight skirts holding a rope taut on stage. One he told to stand on her toes while the other crouched slightly. The rope between them showed a slight angle downward, which the Devil said expressed global mean temperature decreasing slightly from 1998 till now. The Devil’s data was cherry picked […]