This happened the other day not far from where I live. Boulders fall all the time around here, highways regularly blocked. This time, the wording is what stuck. The local sheriff’s post went viral when this fallen obstacle was described as a “large boulder the size of a small boulder.” With those words, this 10,000-pound […]
Curiosities
I found this ill-cared-for painting from 1976, when I was nine, of a spaceship either taking off or landing on a barren world. This was before Star Wars, but I was well-steeped in forbidden worlds and Star Trek. I dreamed of alien planets, their skies red or green, their landscapes sere and wind-torn. I stared […]
Who doesn’t love nominative determinism? The idea that your name plays a significant role in shaping your career or even your destiny is irresistible, especially with a steady supply of examples so copious you could trip over them, and even some science to support the idea. But it got me wondering – what if your […]
You finish the book, you don’t want it to be over with, there’s still one more printed page, so you read it. “A Note on the Type,” it says, and heads off into the highest weeds: the name of the font in which the book is printed, then the font’s forebears, its continuing history, its […]
Are you afraid of the coming AI overlords? Then you’ve probably been sold an exaggerated narrative. Beth Singler, a Cambridge University anthropologist who tires of gratuitous media use of the Terminator pictures, thinks these kinds of representations have skewed our ideas of what AI is capable of. So what is AI really capable of? For […]
My teenage kid is driving, and six feet tall. His feet are bigger than mine. On the way to school we come down a frozen dirt road, him behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat when a rear tire blows. It flops like a seal and he pulls over. The road is a […]
I’d just filled a wine bottle with Malbec and was handing it to a neighbor who was operating the manual corking machine when it occurred to me that wine making is a lot like book writing. I was at the tail end of a whirlwind tour to promote my new book, and I was home […]
First must have come listeningto the wind or regardingthe movements of animals,then monitoring the starsand sometime after thatscrutinizing fire;but somewhere in there belongswatching the progress of a river… Billy Collins, “The List of Ancient Pastimes” Most of the last couple weeks I’ve been sleeping on the ground. I stayed in southern Utah canyons long enough […]