Brown Penguins are black and white—everyone knows this—except when they aren’t, like in April, at a place called Punta Tombo. Punta Tombo is a gnarled peninsula in southern Argentina that hosts a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Every September, more than two hundred thousand of them come here to breed. They pair up, lay a […]
Miscellaneous
There are things I have not revisited since spring 2020 because they remind me too much of the darkest days of the pandemic. Puzzles, for instance. I have not done a puzzle in three years, nor have I eaten frozen Costco salmon (my parents panic-bought us roughly a million fillets in mid-March, and it took […]
Back in 2017, I wrote a post debating whether I should have a second child. I almost didn’t. We tried and tried. We even went to a fertility clinic. And then we decided it probably wasn’t meant to be. I was already 40. “Let’s give it two more months and then call it quits,” I […]
Under a spring sky in the high desert of Western Colorado, we had a little gathering at our house. My wife’s childhood friend, awarded author and translator of Lithuanian poetry Laima Vince, stood on our wooden deck discussing a Jewish poet who was executed along with her family at the age of 19 in 1941 […]
Freshly back from my annual pilgrimage to TED, I’m taking stock of the brain-fizzing input that came my way all week in Vancouver. Each year has its own balance of technology, entertainment and design, and this year all three had a distinctly artificial intelligence flavor. The conference is built on ‘ideas worth spreading’, but the […]
I was in Borneo last fall, in a very wild place called Gunung Palung National Park, following orangutans and macaques and leaf monkeys, oh my. Being around primates is always very exciting, and nobody threw poop, which was a nice change from some primate-viewing experiences I’ve had. And yet, even considering the droopy-cheeked orange apes, […]
The other night I was on a walk and a shrub attacked me. Not an attack, really. We were on the sidewalk and it was claiming part of the airspace above. Of the two of us humans on the walk, I was on the shrub’s side, and the shrub and I had a temporary encounter […]
This post ran a few springs ago, in appreciation and imitation of Craig’s ‘penspective’ series, but with less effective photography. Spring seems like a wonderful time for cloud-spotting here. Last week, there was an amazing lenticular cloud in the shape of a cigar. I didn’t have my pen with me, but I can still remember […]