Redux: Cinderella and the Cinema Hangover

Last time I was in my hometown of Seattle, I walked by the movie theater I worked at for many years in the 1990s and 2000s and found it permanently closed. Being sad and angry about changes in Seattle is kind of a thing, but I wasn’t just upset about a piece of the city–and […]

Seattle: Land of Amazon, Boeing, and Ancient Mammoths

On February 16, 1961, the Seattle Times reported that geologists had dug out the roughly 10,000-year-old bones of a giant sloth from a peat bog near the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Two years later, alongside an article about Boeing’s plans for a supersonic jet and an ad for “Ladies’ Days” bargains on bedspreads and cribs, the newspaper […]

How to conjure a forest out of thin air

This summer, I became slightly obsessed with the Ring. Not the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, not the Japanese horror movie (which I have vowed never to see), but the epic four-opera series by Richard Wagner. Der Ring des Nibelungen spans about 17 hours and features a cast of gods, dwarves, giants, mermaids, and a dragon, all […]

Snark Week: The Gribble

What is the most fearsome animal in the ocean? Is it the great white shark? The deadly stingray? The Megalodon? No. It is the Gribble. A gribble is an adorably chubby wee crustacean about three to six millimeters long. It has seven pairs of legs and four pairs of appendages sprouting around its mouth. And […]