In May, Doug Burgum, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, traveled to the tiny town of Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, to announce a new policy: caribou hunters will soon be allowed to use all-terrain vehicles inside the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Under most circumstances this would piss me off—another misguided plan from […]
Miscellaneous
We first published this conversation 14 years ago. At least half of my peers from high school and university have chosen not to have kids at all. In the end, I stuck with just the one, and so did Michelle. Michelle and Jessa converse about the reasons we chose to stop at one child. Jessa: […]
Nobody wants to go with me to the shitty behind-the-mall carnival, for some reason. It’s one of those ride-packed parking-lot joints, set up and pulled down stunningly fast with less than a week in between. You, too, went to one like it as a kid, didn’t you? Between rides you filled your belly with overpriced […]
This post originally ran in 2018. Nothing has changed. I still won’t go to bed. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME! Yesterday at 8:23am, my husband texted me a link. No note, just a string of random letters and slashes and dots. I clicked and landed on a research article titled “Why don’t you go to bed […]
Not everything can be awful, right? Not everything can be the worst. Anyway, I have just decided that I refuse to let everything be the worst and to succumb to the idea that no, it is, in fact, the worst. I feel a bit guilty about trying to grasp joy, but what choice does any […]
I wrote this on May 7, 2018 and I have no idea why it feels like I wrote it this morning, looking out my window and wondering what I was looking for. I’ve always done this, looked out my window and wondered why I was doing that, what was out there, what was I looking […]
This post first ran in 2023 Abstract Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous. Keywords: […]
Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up […]
