This is the worst time of year for me, for all the reasons. The weather, for one. In January, the length of time until warmth settles seems unbearably long. The prolonged dark (and yes, I know the days are getting longer now, but still) feeds on energy, saps the will to do things. The gray […]
Miscellaneous
I’m writing a book about mountain lions and it’s down to weeks, days, pages flying, margins scratched and scribbled, when news comes of a 46-year-old woman killed by such a cat a couple hundred miles from where I live. She’d been hiking alone on New Year’s Day, forensics consistent with a mountain lion attack, asphyxiation […]
I feel like I’m always saying this, but: it was a weird start to the year. This year, I actually gave myself permission to *not* celebrate New Year’s, that is, I didn’t have to start a new program or a new calendar system, make a fresh start or be a new me. It was a […]
At the height of the last Cold War the U.S. military burrowed into a glacier in northernmost Greenland and installed a nuclear reactor. The reactor was small—“experimental,” the army called it—and designed to power a base that had also been built under the ice. The base was called Camp Century, and it could house up […]
My first week on a real journalism job in Yellowknife, 20 years ago, my boss took me to see the old Giant Mine site. It wasn’t among the tourist traps of the Northwest Territories, but he felt this was a place I needed to understand if I was going to report on industry in the […]
This post first ran in the spring of 2015 and I’ve often wondered if this patch of earth in Iowa is still guarded. A summer not long ago I went for a grueling 3-day backpack through GMO cornfields in Iowa, camping among walls of waxy green leaves that sawed against each other in the breeze. […]
We’re taking and have taken a short break and we’ll be back on Friday, 1/2/2026. Don’t lose faith. We still love you, we do. _________ By Petar Milošević – https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147441865
