I am so angry, so sad. Today I drove my two children to the first day of a weeklong day-camp with a nature theme. They are learning about local species, pressing flowers, that kind of thing. The teachers expected that the kids would spend most of the day outside in nature. Instead, the kids will […]
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For as long as I could read, I have started my day with the morning newspaper. I’ve had a subscription to a printed daily newspaper, and oftentimes two, for all of my adult life. It was a sad day at my house when the Denver Post stopped delivering to our part of Western Colorado in […]
The 2018 FIFA World Cup begins today (or, has already begun, depending on which time zone you’re in and when you’re reading this). This time around, the American team didn’t qualify. It’s embarrassing, to be frank, that we managed to miss the World Cup. You can read more about how it all happened here. Yes, […]
I used to snicker at people who religiously read their daily horoscopes. Astrology is not science. Not even close. “No one has shown that astrology can be used to predict the future or describe what people are like based on their birth dates,” some exasperated person at NASA wrote in a Tumblr post debunking a […]
Driving home through the bottom of Colorado you can’t help hitting mountains. A jigsaw puzzle of passes lies ahead. In the winter, choose your poison, Lizard Head, Wolf Creek, or, in the middle, the dangerous one. The route we took last week put us through the middle route, a chain of two passes leading to […]
I have a friend who is a magician. He performs the occasional stage show with card tricks and coins hidden behind the ear. His work is sleight of hand, a flash of movement deceiving the eye. He’d say it’s science. You experiment and find what actually works. My friend, Angus Stocking, is also a tarot […]
Today marks the publication of yet another study telling us that our screens are making us miserable. Psychologist Jean Twenge at San Diego State University looked at survey results from more than a million U.S. 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders and found that those who spent more than an hour a day gazing into the rectangular […]
The Awl died. Or will die, in a couple of weeks. It was/is a website with the usual internet attitude – an awl, dear children, is a sharp pointed instrument for punching holes — but not the usual internet manners. My Twitter feed is full of writers who were young a few years ago, who […]