This post first ran in the early days of the pandemic. There are some parts of the silence that I miss. But today, I am working in the back room of an elementary school as the “adult on site” during a camp run by high school students. There is singing and shrieking and laughter and […]
Miscellaneous
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. My training as a scientist taught me to revere the scientific method, and I continue to hold science in the highest regard. Science can teach us much about the world and ourselves, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it can allow us to […]
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 […]
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 […]
