At 10:20 last Monday morning I sat at a table outside of Tucson, Arizona, writing these words: The land does not move, frozen to our eyes. Within a minute or two, a small but notable earthquake struck outside of the almost-ghost town of Bedrock, Colorado, 600 miles away. It was 4.5 on the Richter scale. […]
Curiosities
I have been trying to write more letters, the kind that have an envelope and a stamp and go into that white box with the little flag at the end of our driveway. It’s a work in progress, I’m still at a ratio of about 579 emails and texts to one letter. So this […]
During the descent of the most recent polar vortex, you probably heard that the Midwest was colder than Antarctica. And it was! But then the Midwest usually is, this time of year. The comparison “colder than Antarctica” makes sense on a visceral level. If the temperatures are below zero and the windchills are in the […]
It is the time of year for little lights. There are tiny points of light along the eaves of our neighbors’ houses. There are lights along the city streets, too. Some are arranged in a pattern so they look like dolphins. Some are shaped like shooting stars. On Sunday, some houses began to light the […]
I walked along the beach a few days ago a quarter mile landward of the San Andreas fault zone. Surfers were swimming out and riding the curls back on the west side of San Francisco. Sets picked them up over the Pacific Plate and swept them onto North America. A hundred feet below, the […]
If you’re familiar with the internet, you know there’s a problem with the word “actually”. After initially gaining recognition in 2012 as “the worst word on the planet”, it quickly rose to an unpopularity stratospheric enough to justify think pieces in The New Republic and The Atlantic. Its ill repute transcends the English language: last year, […]
