This essay originally appeared on LWON in 2012 as part of a series on the seven deadly sins. Since then, sociopathy hasn’t gone away, so we’re reposting it here. I wuz robbed. A few months ago a scientific discovery that I had covered in depth in my most recent book became the subject of a […]
Miscellaneous
“The English Riviera”. A phrase that sounds like a classic example of British acerbic humour, and I had already emotionally prepared myself to laugh despondently at the sight of some especially bleak industrial waterfront. But when I drove down to the South Coast of England, through hours of the most glorious “sunlit uplands” countryside you […]
A couple weeks ago, we were driving through Wyoming when I saw a sign for the Oregon Trail Cutoff. At this point we’d been in the car for something like four hours, and blessedly we were on some stretch of highway with reception, so I googled it. The cutoff, I learned, was the Lander Trail, […]
This piece is from a few years ago, and I’ll have you know I’m working steadily on a new book and continuing to shape my identity and dreaming of bottle-feeding goats in my next life. I continue to fret over the tribalism and the flies. I’m not sure what any of it means, but it’s […]
In shipping my grandfather’s 200-pound desk from my cousin in San Francisco to me in Ottawa, we found, too late, that Ottawa is devoid of bonded warehouses. This matters because customs can only be cleared for large objects like this through a warehouse bonded for such a purpose, and the nearest of these facilities is […]
Note: This post is about suicide, so please skip it if you’re not up for that right now. Last month we lost a friend of ours, a seventeen year-old girl. My first impulse when I got the call was to clean our house. I didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing to do, […]
Last summer I wrote in this space about discovering figs. This summer I was ready for them. My neighbor with the fig tree started texting with progress reports in mid July. In August, they hit: Figs. Figs, figs, figs, figs. I’ve been on many fig-retrieval expeditions in the last two weeks. I arrive, bowl in […]
This post originally ran on October 11, 2011. Back then, I didn’t really understand why people would use these sensory deprivation pods. In the wake of the past 5 years, I can only hope one day we can all have our own sensory deprivation pods. The second I close the hatch behind me, it occurs […]