Road Trip

Several times in the last few weeks, I’ve found myself driving Highway 101 from Santa Barbara to Berkeley, a 320-mile route. The trip starts out along the ocean, then dips in and out of oak-dotted hills. Later, the road slices through the Salinas Valley and then into Silicon Valley. The last part is my least favorite—the […]

The Language of Change

The nature writer Robert Macfarlane is so skilled—so precise, so observant—that he can make an unsuspecting reader long for mudflats. This careful selector of words is also a collector of them: Macfarlane has just published a lovely essay (and a book) about his hoard of “place words,” terms gathered over years of travel in Britain […]