“It’s like a good plague,” read the tweet from one of my NPR station’s editors. Epic floods across the Midwest this summer, which more than one local official referred to as “biblical,” brought a wave of frogs and toads to Missouri. It is hard to overstate how much water inundated my adopted state, and […]
LWON
“Twitter is a sewer,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens last week in one of the many skirmishes that have now coalesced into the phenomenon known as Bedbug-gate. The ongoing saga is quite beyond the remit of this blog (though we do a brisk trade in actual bedbugs). But I’ll take Stephens’ sewer […]
I recently bought a camera that prints pictures immediately upon exposing them. Remember those? It’s pretty fun, and it’s nice if, like me, you take a lot of pictures and then save them in your iCloud and forget to look at them. Or at least forget until your phone sends you an automated “memory,” and […]
It’s my dog’s birthday today, so re-sharing this post from the winter felt appropriate. Also I am on deadline. Last fall, when I was deeply in need of a warm, distracting project, I got a puppy. She is very cute, extremely soft, and really annoying. She enjoys chewing everything, but she especially loves my shoelaces […]
Note: This post originally ran Dec. 7, 2018, and is being resurrected for Atacama Week. Please consume extra water and enjoy. Driving in a foreign country is a good way to turn your head inside out. It shakes the cobwebs and forces you to rearrange the heavy furniture of your mind. You need to make […]
Before my sophomore year of high school, I went to Sea Camp, a week-long summer program in La Jolla, Calif., for (privileged) kids like me who were interested in marine biology. We learned about fish biology during the day. At night, we roasted marshmallows under the stars before falling asleep in our bunks. I was […]
Apologies in advance, but I’m a person who quit Twitter for a month and now you’re going to have to endure the lessons I learned from my time away. Don’t worry: this post contains 0 percent yoga. And I’m still on Twitter. Look, you may not care about Twitter, but I had a problem. I’m […]
I know a guy who doesn’t have a birthday. Andy* was born in the Moroccan desert. His parents were nomads. There were no smartphones in the 1960s and a nomadic tribe didn’t have much use for the Gregorian calendar. And when it came to recalling the exact day and month of Andy’s birth, there were […]