When I was 16, I went off to be a kayaking instructor at a Boy Scouts camp in Ontario called Opemikon. The camper population was divided into little kids and big kids, and I was the only girl on staff watching the big kids, so I got my own platform tent whereas everyone else had […]
Miscellaneous
Pete has a poison oak rash in his armpit. The backs of my knees and left shoulder blade are starting to itch. It’s a sign of spring—a sign that last weekend, for the first time in a while, we did something really good. No, not that. Last weekend we hopped fences, clambered over downed trees, […]
We are people who love clubs. By “we” I mean all of us. As much as we pledge unity and “oneness,” people are regularly slapping on a label of some kind and then flashing that label to those who don’t have it. It’s human nature to affiliate, of course, and it’s also satisfying to belong. […]
When I was a few weeks pregnant, I met a new friend, who is an expert in sanitation for low-resource contexts, for coffee in The Hague, where I live. I hadn’t told her about my status, but she must have gotten some whiff of a pheromone or something because she mentioned, off-handedly, that a program […]
There’s something wrong with men. I am one, I feel it. Something is broken. The last two mass shootings — two massage spas and a grocery store — might be old news by the time you read this, but it feels like an open wound. How are you doing? We say we’re becoming numb and […]
Sometimesin the springout walkingI get the feelthat the earth itself is speaking,that it has its own language,written in ice
On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow […]
This post originally appeared in 2012, before advances in artificial intelligence brought the possibility of deep fakes and other ways for storytelling artifacts to lie. Here I looked at the ways in which information can be false, and how we typically only look or check for certain kinds of veracity. Ever since reading the comment […]
