On November 6, 2015, when this was originally published, I had just arrived back from the most bizarre trip my work has ever taken me on–and I’ve been on some pretty weird reporting expeditions. It was my first (and probably last) experience of being a royal guest in a place where royalty really runs the […]
Miscellaneous
A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile. -Shakespeare, The Winters Tale I still am learning how to behave during a pandemic. Some things are simple: I know that I should wash my hands frequently with soap for at least 20 seconds. I know that I should cancel my social […]
On March 1st, I got concerned enough to start asking a few beloved elders if they had two weeks of supplies. (They did.) The next day, I stopped touching my face. Last week, I stopped going to restaurants. Monday, when I left the office for my two regular work-from-home days, I thought I might not […]
By the time you finish reading this paragraph, somewhere in America, someone — a long-haul trucker cruising a lonely highway in Iowa, a soccer dad piloting his Subaru through the Virginia suburbs, a lawyer commuting to her office in Atlanta or Bismarck or Madison — will have hit a white-tailed deer. Since the mid-20th century, […]
Several years ago the Economist published a chart for American expats in the UK. It disambiguated what British people say from what Americans hear them say. For example, “you’re very brave” does not mean “I think you are brave” when a Brit says it. It is more likely to mean “you are insane.” I had […]
Very occasionally, a post we write here is, unbeknownst to us, incomplete. It will only be concluded by our readers, who finish the job in the comments section. On August 28, 2015, I posed a mystery in the form of a very old document, and I thought I had more or less solved that riddle […]
For the love of trees and their leafy kin, and with Australia’s horrendous fires on my mind, here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago about the surprising capabilities of plants that make their burning especially sad. Meanwhile, researchers continue to uncover remarkable details about plants’ lives, as in this report about their (almost […]
A partially fictionalized diary of antvasion Sept. 15 Line of small black ants across the kitchen floor. Origin and destination unclear. Some have abdomens cocked upward at a jaunty angle, like ant hotrods. This makes them look more aggressive and hooligany somehow. Gone before noon, as if they had never been. Sept. 16 (Forget about […]