Wish We Were Here

This is a travel story about a place I’ve never been. Maybe it’s a strange destination—a single, cold room. It’s thousands of miles from where I am, though, which makes it seem fascinating based on distance alone. But even better: inside it, you’d find pieces of the whole world. More than 500 million tiny pieces. […]

Bug On My Airplane Window

I love seeing bugs on windows, for reasons I’ve never fully worked out. I’ve even written about it before on this blog. Normally those bugs are on the outside of the window and I’m on the inside. That’s how I prefer it. I think the bugs prefer it that way, too. They are out in the world, taking […]

River time, river tongue

It was a bird of confluences. Nameless, to us. Gray as cloud belly, large as raptor, with eyes streaked over black as if with a stick of charcoal. The first time I saw it, I stood shin deep in the narrow, clear Pitman River, steps away from the line of opaque jade water marking its […]

The Map Box

I keep a wooden box on my bedside table. It’s cheap – an old Yalumba Wine case that I found on a curb somewhere, with a hinged lid and a shred of price tag still attached. Usually, it’s stacked high with magazines half read, a thing seldom opened and often dusty. But in all of […]

Do I Stay Or Do I Go? The Eveleth Conundrum

  Two years ago, I wrote a story for The Atlantic about my obsession with the town of Eveleth, Minnesota. I’ve never been there. But I’ve visited it often on Google Maps. Often enough to know the town really well. To know the giant hockey stick, the city hall, the big church, the tattoo shop […]

Memories in My Kitchen

It was a year and a half after my internship at NPR, and I was in the habit of calling Joanne Silberner, who was then on NPR’s staff, for advice whenever I got a terrifying new assignment. I suppose this makes her one of my first journalism mentors. At the time, I’d convinced the magazine […]

A Squee from the Field: Why I Love my Job

Sometimes, while out on the job, I have to pinch myself and think, ‘hold on to this moment.’ Because the moments that make up my workday can be truly fabulous. Here’s what last week’s pinch was for: I was squatting on the ground at the Bifengxia panda base in central China, on a cloudy but pleasantly […]

Walking in the Land in Between

I love walking. This seems like such a silly thing to say, like “I love breathing.” We’re humans, you and me. Walking is our thing. Being bipedal makes us us. But walking is also an activity that I love. It takes me places, it shows me things, it gives me ideas, it calms my nerves. […]