Chasing the northern lights

I can’t remember why I decided I needed to see the northern lights again. Maybe it was nostalgia. I remembered seeing them as a child, standing in the big yard facing Canada and watching them dance above the pasture. Sometimes I spent the night at my aunt and uncle’s in town, we’d stand in the […]

The internet and the overmind

When the internet was young, David Bowie was asked by a skeptical journalist whether it would ever have any real impact on the world. Wasn’t it just a fad whose transformative potential artists were exaggerating in a bid to stay relevant with the youths? It was 1999, and while this stance is easy to mock […]

Our Moon

Our Becky wrote a book. It came out yesterday. It’s beautiful. And I got to talk with her about it. * Cameron: Could you tell the story about how this book came to be? Becky: When I started working on this proposal, I imagined it as a sort of appreciation—here’s how cool the Moon is, […]

Bat Facts (Kate’s Version)

Note: This is a personal essay that happens to include a lot of neat facts about bats. It should not be confused with Our Helen’s excellent 2017 post of the same name. I suggest reading both; there’s no such thing as too much information about bats. The facts and statistics in this piece are accurate […]

Along the Urban Ecotone

The skirt of Las Vegas, Nevada, is a frictional zone scrubbed with busted tortoise shells and Joshua trees that lean toward the sun. High tension power lines intersect at substations and disperse from there into the desert. A buddy and I camped in this liminal space a couple months ago and all night long the […]

The Completion Portfolio

Disclaimer: If you come here for the science, you can skip this post. I feel like writing about resource allocation today. If you ever visit a financial planner or investment advisor, they will likely ask about your job. That’s because much of your wealth, especially if you are young, is invisible. It’s in your ‘human […]

Train Time

Pete and I just got back from a winter trip to Colorado. It was a real vacation — we drove around the mountains and mesas, hiked up side canyons, went to bed early, slept in, ate our hosts’ homemade biscuits and gravy for breakfast. (We also saw Christie, who made us such good pizza, and […]

Number the Days

I first wrote the following post about how much I love new calendars in January 2020, when I was full of ideas and plans about the coming year. Oops. But even as the pandemic waxed and waned, I continued to love calendars. I’d head into January with the idea that I needed to start this […]