Lately I’ve been having recurring nightmares about packing. In the dreams I badly want to get somewhere – onto a plane, off of a bus, into a boat – but I can’t, because I have too much shit. I can’t jettison anything in the dream, and yet there’s no way to get everything into my […]
Miscellaneous
Helen, currently hors de combat but returning soon to battle, has been listening for birds forever and ever since she wrote this, October 2, 2019. For all I know, she can now tell sparrows apart, a magisterial accomplishment. -Ed. I’ve always been bad at bird songs. My neighbor corrected me on this on Sunday, as […]
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 […]
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, […]
