The other day I made a plant friend. My plant friend is some kind of squash. Pumpkin, maybe. It grows along the edge of a community garden that I walk by on my way to work. Like many of those squash-like plants, it uses tendrils to anchor itself, clinging in tight spirals to the fence […]
Helen
The equinox is past. At last, fall has come to the northern hemisphere. Some of the ways the new season shows up are obvious. The sunset creeps earlier and earlier as we race toward the winter solstice. The air cools. Pumpkin spice is in every product imaginable. Others are subtler. There’s the spooky Halloween decoration […]
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about eating meat–as in, whether it’s a thing I still want to do–and thought now was a good time to revisit this post from two years ago about whale. Whales are impressive, enormous, beloved animals. Whaling has been banned since the 1980s, but it still goes on in a […]
Two weeks ago, my living room was home to a miraculous transformation. In truth, this transformation was utterly mundane: An insect entered the last stage of its development. It just happened to do it on my dining room table. And it was beautiful.
The Milky Way hung overhead. The lights from the far-off plains made a faint glow in the eastern sky. I made one last visit to the pit toilet at the edge of the parking lot, put on my day pack, and began to plod. I was setting out to climb a mountain with my dad. […]
Once upon a time, I was a fan of bands that gave me some kind of alternative cred. I have been to a ton of They Might Be Giants concerts, which places me solidly in the ranks of the nerds. I spent many years in love with R.E.M. and have listened to all of their […]
I’ve done it. I figured out how to eat vegetables. Maybe everyone else figured this out a long time ago. But it took me until this year to figure out how to stuff myself with plant parts all summer long. It’s a two-step process. One, a service. The second, a device on my refrigerator door.
This weekend the movie Ant-Man opened. It’s the latest in the pretty-entertaining crop of movies based on Marvel Comics characters, like Iron Man and The Avengers. I haven’t seen Ant-Man yet. But I’m not going to let that stop me from telling film executives what their next insect-based superhero movies should be. There’s already been […]