This week we’re celebrating the holiday by looking back on some favorite posts about snow, cold, and ice. This post originally ran Nov 20, 2014. On my way to the dry cleaners, I passed a gaggle of highschoolers on their way home from class. The high was 16 degrees yesterday, and the wind made it […]
Cassandra
The holidays can be stressful. So stressful you lose sleep. Maybe you need Placidyl. This post originally ran February 5, 2013. Ahh, the 1960s. A simpler time when women wore pant-skirts and insomnia could be cured by the soothing sounds of Liadov’s Musical Snuff Box. Well, not quite. Flip open this album and you’ll find a two-page […]
You woke up screaming in the middle of the night, frantic. You held up your bunny, a floppy square of pink blanket attached to a long-eared rabbit head. “This bunny is not perfect,” you wailed. I knew what you meant. This bunny, one of three identical bunnies, is the oldest, the most worn. His fur […]
Dear readers: Everything is terrible. It feels like the beginning of the end of the world. Or maybe the middle of the end of the world. My brain spends its days vacillating between wild panic and stubborn denial. My denial actually takes the form of obsessive online research, which is why I have wasted approximately […]
For years I’ve been reading about mass shootings. School shootings. Campus shootings. Shootings in bars. Shootings at concerts. Las Vegas. Orlando. Virginia Tech. Sandy Hook. Parkland. The stories keep coming, and each new one elicits horror. We can’t help but be dumbstruck by the senseless carnage. But there’s also some small measure of relief. Not […]
Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and over again. “The world is at least fifty percent terrible/and that’s a conservative estimate,” Smith writes. Really conservative. Right now, I’d put the number closer to ninety percent. Nearly […]
July 30 – August 3: Climate, sex, and death edition Everyone is getting nervous about the climate these days, or the weather, or the fires, or the droughts, or all the opaque but undeniable links that bind them. Emma is not so much nervous as she is furious. We’ve known about climate change – and […]
This post originally ran May 31, 2012. But you won’t even notice. Worm sex is perhaps the most evergreen of evergreen topics. My husband and I often take nighttime walks. On one such walk, I noticed something strange on the ground. It looked like a shiny stick. I leaned in for a closer look and […]