Yesterday afternoon, all at once, my son and I started to feel a little sluggish. For me, a little afternoon slump isn’t so surprising. But for a kid who’s usually climbing up doorjambs, ripping off pull-ups, or teaching himself how to do a corkscrew flip on the trampoline, it’s weird. But there we were in […]
Health/Medicine
In 2016 my editor assigned me an article about a then-recently identified genetic association between three medical conditions: postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome (hEDS), and mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS). As it so happens, I have all three of these. After minimal reflection, I decided to take a journalistic risk and […]
My 16-year-old is leaving alone for a month of language school in Tokyo. Being born and raised outside of towns under population 700, closer to 300 in some cases, should put a dizzying spin on the experience. We’ve had epic urban adventures together, but not off this continent, certainly not in the vast compression of […]
This is Part 2 of my interview with Jennifer Lunden, author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. You can read Part 1 here. Kate: The main thing I took away from your early advice to me about book writing was “buy yourself […]
Bryn Nelson is a Seattle-based science writer whose book, Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure, came out September 13. Yes, that’s right–it’s a book about poop. So of course, Helen and Cameron wanted to take a deep dive into this important (seriously!) topic. Here’s our conversation with Bryn, which has been lightly edited […]
A couple of years ago, on this very site, I related the legend of the Egg Dog — basically, how my beloved companion, Kit, had an uncanny predilection for finding and delivering the eggs laid by our neighborhood chickens. Since then, I’ve resisted the temptation to document all of Kitty’s exploits, which, believe me, are […]
Earlier this week we all piled into the van and went to the Weird Al concert. My inner twelve-year-old was thrilled. Weird Al, well, he rocked. I was inspired to finally see Weird Al in person after a really lovely story about him appeared in the New York Times magazine early in the pandemic, a […]
Facebook is a rough place to mourn. When we reached a million dead from COVID in the US this month, I put up a post saying it seems there’ll be no memorial, no park with sculptures where we can gather to share common grief and remember the dead, many of whom passed in isolation. I […]