They have us singing O Canada! – but it fails to produce the effect of a rousing round of The Star-Spangled Banner in Yankee Stadium. Far from riled up, we feel like children at school again, trying to remember how the French bits go. Then the rocks hit the ice. It is the world’s premier curling […]
Miscellaneous
On February 29, after having lunch in Hood River, Oregon, Kozen Sampson drove to a quiet neighborhood to take his dogs for a walk. He was getting out of his car, he says, when a man with brown hair approached and kicked his car door. The door smacked Sampson in the ear, knocking his head against the door frame. Then Sampson, stunned […]
What a week! Is there a theme? Sort of. Something about things that have power over our behavior. Some are real, some are tricks of a sort. Some are Andy Kaufman (again). Guest poster Ann Garvin tells us that we are doomed to eat all the M&Ms because they come in so many pretty colors (the point […]
March showed up last week, on little cat feet rather than lion paws. A gentle snow jacketed the crocuses before watering their roots. The least patient daffodils opened, heads dipped against any last-ditch icy gusts. Spring’s legs are wobbly, but she’ll find her stride soon enough. Still, at my little cabin in the Virginia woods, […]
February 29 – March 4, 2016 This week, Helen and her friends became famous using nothing but some marshmallows and an idea. Here’s the blow-by-blow of her brush with celebrity. Craig reports from the Bering Strait where, as ever, he walks in two overlaid landscapes, separated by thousands of years. Rose has a fantasy life in […]
Blacksmith Scene (1893), thought to be the first staged narrative in film Last summer, after a decade in Canada’s Northwest Territories, I moved south to Ottawa. It is a city that holds deeper roots for me the longer I dig. Every day, I pass the park where my high school friends used to hang, and […]
Two years ago, I wrote a story for The Atlantic about my obsession with the town of Eveleth, Minnesota. I’ve never been there. But I’ve visited it often on Google Maps. Often enough to know the town really well. To know the giant hockey stick, the city hall, the big church, the tattoo shop […]
My desk is a mess, skulls, books and papers strewn. The cast of a saber-tooth cat skull sits on the corner, resting on its two double-edged daggers, reminding me of the book I am writing about the first people in North America, and what they encountered. As I crab myself over the keyboard, the Smilodon skull […]
