Fucking cancer. It just killed one of the finest editors I’ve ever known, and the sadness weighs on my heart like an anchor to this terrible world. Cancer also claimed the life of my dear friend Karen Hornbostel. I’ve been thinking about Karen lately, and what she might have thought of Lance Armstrong’s recent comeback. […]
Miscellaneous
I was at the Getty Museum in LA not long ago, and inside its cavernous entrance my kids and I found a spot where we could stand one at a time, speaking, making sounds, snapping, clapping, and hearing ourselves bounce back in surround-sound. Since this post originally ran November 21, 2017, I’ve found numerous more […]
This post originally appeared January 12, 2017 Perhaps 500 yards from my door—up an icy, winding driveway, a short way down a gravel road, beyond barbed wire fences and snow-skirffed pastures and the wind-twisted trunks of piñon and juniper trees—is a barn that shelters two sailboats in the middle of the Colorado desert. I first […]
This post (published in May 2018) seemed worth resurfacing after the astonishing recent news that the Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library had flown to our celestial neighbor with Earth life aboard. For the record, I love the Lunar Library concept (cf., below). But I think the tardigrades were a bad idea. After several thousand years […]
Late summer makes me think of thunderstorms, baseball and Steve. This post first appeared in 2014. Last weekend there was an unseasonable lightning storm on the coast. Not here (thank goodness, for our dog’s sake), but farther south. More than 1,400 strikes touched down across the region, with 13 people reporting injuries in Los Angeles […]
This week (and to be honest, part of last), what with August being August, we’re running the posts we’ve liked best. Maybe we have criteria by which we choose, possibly not. We hope you like them.
For every story that makes it to print, there are scads that die in the reporting trenches. This is one of those stories. It originally ran in October 2013. In 2001, I moved to Bolivia to become a Peace Corps volunteer and fell deeply in love with the country. In 2010, I returned. I wanted […]
On the edge of a calm sea, watching the fog come in and out like a tide, I thought it might be a nice time to revisit this comics poem from December, 2018.
