I wish I could remember – but I can’t – the woman who told me a story about how she and other women in her profession had regular lunches, casually, unofficially, no agenda. Was she a lawyer? A writer? An astronomer? Just don’t remember. The thing I’m sure about is that the point was not […]
Commentary
I joined a film crew several years ago in Chilean Patagonia where we put together a flick opposing dams along the turquoise rivers of the Aysén region. At the time, stopping the advance of some of the biggest investors in the world seemed impossible. But soon more films were made, protests ignited across the country to save […]
I close on a house this week. I’ve never done this before, not quite sure how the paperwork is supposed to happen. It’s not much of a place really, almost a thousand square feet and a loft with spaces between the planks where my older boy pressed his eye, watching his brother being born on the […]
I have a policy: never read the comments. This rule applies to most of the publications where my work appears online, such as FiveThirtyEight, Slate and The Washington Post. (LWON is the exception. Comments left here require approval before they’re posted, and I read them all.) It might seem unfriendly to ignore people who are […]
Ann: It’s been a fairly dreadful year, personally and nationally, and giving thanks is going to be a stretch. But even when I was a kid, I was thankless. When my grandfather said grace at Sunday dinners — “Bless, oh Lord, this food to our use and us to thy service” — I thought the […]
In light of who became president elect last week, I find myself searching for patterns to understand what might be happening, and what’s next. I don’t presume unrelated processes mirror each other, but there are uncanny resemblances. In this case, I believe Trump is the end of the Ice Age. He is — I believe, I hope […]
Today is Election Day in the United States. For the past several months, this election, the most brutal, mean-spirited, and frankly alarming in decades, has caused a wave of anxiety, dread, and bitterness to blanket the country like a kind of noxious psychic soot. The American Psychological Association reports that 52 percent of American adults say […]
With fewer than a dozen days left until Election Day, I’m having a hard time looking at the news. The blurzy noise of the past few months has become unbearable: polls, rigged elections, pantsuits, emails, orange, yelling, balloons. I’m still processing some of the answers I gave my ten-year old when she blurted out at […]
