Well THAT Smells Warm

God damn it, advertising can be powerful. I mean, not that I would ever buy some stupid crap because I saw it advertised on TikTok, of all platforms…that place is rife with over-hyped junk and over-painted hawkers (the term “influencer” makes my toes curl, no joke) and I’m not pathetic enough to fall for their […]

Redux: I Saw Them Standing There

It was 60 years ago today that the Beatles first appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” This post originally ran in 2012. I was watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” the other night when I got to thinking about Galileo. “Ladies and gentlemen, here are The Beatles!” cried Ed, in his imitable style, and the camera […]

N is for Norman, eaten by a lionness

This post originally appeared in March 2012. “It is with the deepest sorrow that I have to inform you of the death of your son Norman. He died after an encounter with a lion near the Keito River in Portuguese West Africa 10/5/15. He made a very gallant fight and killed the lion with his […]

Getting Gravid

This week we had our 22-week ultrasound, the detailed scan for all the things no one wants to think about: cysts in the brain, malformed heart chambers, exposed vertebrae. Will (we’ve started calling him Will) is moving a lot now, rotating and arching his back, kicking his legs and arms. In my mind he’s like a […]

Stuck In the Middle With Oystercatchers and You

We often celebrate the beginnings of things, and the ends of things, but what about the middles? The middle can be a gray place, either boring or too eventful in all the wrong ways. That’s what this part of the year feels like to me– I’m missing the cozy days of early winter, where candles […]

Chasing the northern lights

I can’t remember why I decided I needed to see the northern lights again. Maybe it was nostalgia. I remembered seeing them as a child, standing in the big yard facing Canada and watching them dance above the pasture. Sometimes I spent the night at my aunt and uncle’s in town, we’d stand in the […]

The internet and the overmind

When the internet was young, David Bowie was asked by a skeptical journalist whether it would ever have any real impact on the world. Wasn’t it just a fad whose transformative potential artists were exaggerating in a bid to stay relevant with the youths? It was 1999, and while this stance is easy to mock […]

Our Moon

Our Becky wrote a book. It came out yesterday. It’s beautiful. And I got to talk with her about it. * Cameron: Could you tell the story about how this book came to be? Becky: When I started working on this proposal, I imagined it as a sort of appreciation—here’s how cool the Moon is, […]