24 Reasons to Ignore Best Places Lists

The latest issue of Sunset Magazine arrived in my mail last week, and the cover story immediately caught my eye — “24 Best Places to Live and Work 2014.” “Looking for the perfect place to launch a career? Start a family? Just relax? We’ve found the ideal city, town, or neighborhood for you.” For instance, if […]

Why Potsherds Matter

I broke a pot the other day, not just any pot but a ceramic Acoma vessel I inherited after my father died decades ago. I snatched something from the shelf, barely tapping the little seed jar, its mouth big enough for a finger, maybe two. It barely rocked one way and then the other, energy […]

Like Poetry for Science

At a biological field station in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona —  towering canyons and clear-running creeks — a Stanford scientist attending a poetry workshop volunteered to get up for an evening reading. He’d spent the week studying with poet Sherwin Bitsui in an environmental writing program put on by Orion magazine, using specimen […]

Grickle Grass

Finding a decent bedtime story to read to your kid is harder than you might think. Most childrens books are either pointless (Superman likes red! Superman likes blue!), overproduced (A book with buttons and recorded dinosaur sounds! Wait, who made these recordings?), boring (Pokey the Bear showed Susie she had the strength the whole time!), […]

Toxic Beauty

There’s a little patch of horror growing along my weekly drive, a strange blossoming on the side of the highway. People can’t stop pulling over for it. Flowers have appeared in profusion, alpine firecrackers of penstemon and some blue-hooded species, maybe an Aconite, wolfsbane, not one I know because they are invasives seeded across a […]

Redux: Water in Yomibato

In 2016, I went to the Peruvian Amazon on assignment for National Geographic. I focused on a group of indigenous people, the Matsiguenka, living inside Manu National Park. One of my sources was Alejo Machipango, a hunter, farmer, and member of the water committee for the village of Yomibato. Alejo is about 34, but I […]

The End of Anonymity

I’m currently working on a story about a homicide. In my case, there’s no doubt about the identity of the victim or the person who killed him. But I’ve used online court records, social media pages, real estate listings, and other digital data to fill in their biographies. It is a commonplace now to observe […]