First: what is an idea? Its physical manifestation must be some clump of brain cells activating in some very specific pattern, but the result feels like something more. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert describes ideas as beings that travel from person to person, bestowing their gifts upon an individual. She describes an idea she had […]
Miscellaneous
Madeline Ostrander is a passionate and talented science journalist and a good friend. Her must-read book At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth is on shelves now. KATE: What initially sparked this project for you? MADELINE: Like most people who’ve been writing about climate change for a long time, I’ve […]
On the eve of 1942, Winston Churchill was in Ottawa on a Zelenskyy-style rally-the-allies speech in the Canadian parliament before the next “invasion season” of WWII was to arrive, having come straight from doing the same in America (you can watch the speech here, known best by its closing line, ‘some chicken, some neck’). He […]
It is me again, with my hopeful calendars! I originally wrote this post in January 2020, when the calendar did seem like a place where you could write something on a certain date and there would be a reasonable chance that it would come to pass. I feel much more timid now, three years on. […]
The end of the year is a time for lists. Our Ten Favorite Books, Twelve Movies We Loved, Twenty-Seven TikToks that Perfectly Captured the National Mood in 2022. We’re a society obsessed with rankings — with the quantification of media, the comparison of culture, the litanization of everything. We writers are the worst of the […]
Say what you will about 2022, but for me, it’s been a great year of reading. By that I mean, I’ve read a lot of really good books. I keep my yearly book list only for myself, and I try not to get competitive about racking up numbers. The reading itself is the point. That […]
Finally, we’re nearing the year’s end — a time to rest, reset, and reflect. Even the apps on my phone are eager to review my year, feeding my own data back to me: Strava tells me how many miles I’ve biked, Reddit shows me the number of posts I’ve read, and Spotify feeds me a […]
Last night I spent time with a friend who doesn’t have a cell phone. Can you imagine that? He shrugged and said he finds he doesn’t really need one. He had a flip phone for a while, then 3G went offline and he decided not to re-up. I wanted to cling to the hem of […]
