The other day I opened the “notes” app on my iPhone and recognized almost nothing I had written there. Scraps of thoughts, reminders, the titles of books recommended. Their context long gone, they lost their meaning and became something else. Scraps of half-drunk poetry, maybe, that begged for some pictures to renew their purpose.
Miscellaneous
I’ve prayed for rain many times, thirsty in the desert, craving a flash flood in a remote canyon. Watching rain fall, silky virga growing legs and touching ground, is worth any petition. I don’t know if prayers work. I’ve been a supplicant in the face of an oncoming thunderstorm only to see it make a […]
Apologies in advance, but I’m a person who quit Twitter for a month and now you’re going to have to endure the lessons I learned from my time away. Don’t worry: this post contains 0 percent yoga. And I’m still on Twitter. Look, you may not care about Twitter, but I had a problem. I’m […]
From olden days of secrets, lies, conspiracies, Russians spies, bad things going on in a good world, and increasing numbers of people FOIA-ing the hell out of things, I bring you the case of a science historian going about his business of looking behind walls and under rocks and finding a story called Dead Atom […]
Recently I visited Japan for the first time in more than 16 years. I lived in the southwestern city of Kumamoto from 1998 to 2000, and other than a visit in December of 2002, I’d never been back. So, on April 16, there I was, finally back in Japan, and I was happy. So happy. […]
Being married to an economist means many things. For one, it means losing a lot of arguments. Economists are like the physicists of the social scientists. They insist that, when you boil off everything else, their discipline is the one the perfectly describes how everything works. It also means that you get to hear a […]
When a society uses a suite of technologies that a single adult can master in his or her lifetime—building a house from scratch, farming, spinning cotton, making medicines, having babies, hunting, fishing, singing and dancing—then it is possible to attain a high level of competency in nearly every major task an adult may be called […]
Millions of years ago, there they were. Floating around, taking in the sights as much as a single-celled organism can, turning carbon dioxide into oxygen, supporting the food chain—diatoms did all the things that they still do now. And then, they died. When they died, they drifted down to the bottoms of lakes and […]
