This winter in Baltimore we suffered. We steeled ourselves against record-breaking cold, and our heating bills were scandalous. There was so much snow that the children got tired of sledding. (It snowed on Tax Day, for Pete’s sake.) Months later, the potholes are punishing, and my fig tree is at death’s door. As far as […]
Guest Post
People say that writing a book is something of an obsession. It has to be. Why else would you turn over your life for several years to, say, the sex life of bedbugs or the dark energy driving the universe? In our case, it was 18th-century Iceland that did us in — more specifically, a […]
We haven’t had a Triple Crown winner in 36 years, since a horse named Affirmed won in 1978. This year, there’s a lot of buzz around a chestnut colt named California Chrome. He’s already won the Kentucky Derby and The Preakness, and word is he has a good chance to win Saturday’s mile-and-one-half Belmont Stakes, […]
According to ancient historians, Archimedes spent the last moments of his life drawing figures in the dirt, so deeply entranced with the pleasures of geometry that he failed to notice the bloody pillage of Syracuse right outside his door. Aloofness, it’s tempting to conjecture, was his fatal flaw. By many accounts, he paid scant attention when […]
The moment of my son’s birth is seared into my brain, but fogginess reigns in the aftermath. Our hospital stay is a series of blurry memories: broken sleep, a jaundiced and hungry newborn, and me crying while scarfing down a few forkfuls of food in my spare moments alone. Once home, I didn’t immediately feel […]
On a recent quiet Sunday morning, I resolved to clean the caked-on grime on my stove. A roiling pot of pasta had overflowed one night, and in the rush to get plate to table and food to four-year-old’s mouth, the cloudy starchy water had cured onto the enamel around the burner and now refused to budge. […]
If neuroscientists could pick one idea to pack into a wormhole and expel to the outer reaches of the galaxy, there would be several worthy candidates. Some would probably pick the notion that you can “read” people’s tastes and preferences and even political ideologies on brain scans. Others might banish all talk of “neuroplasticity” and […]
Recently, in a yoga class, I started crying. The tears welled up as I took a bind while in side-angle pose (look it up) and finally dribbled down as we settled into our final position—lying flat on the mat. Then they just kept coming. Soon I was hup-supping (as my husband’s grandmother used to say) […]
