It wasn’t just the initial intensity of the pain — a hot, vibrant shard plunging into my metatarsus and radiating up my shinbone — but its duration. From approximately 10 o’clock in the morning, when I stepped barefoot onto a reddish-brown ant in my San Fernando Valley backyard, until well after sunset, the agony […]
Month: August 2015
August 24 – 28, 2015 This week, words mattered – whether they be spoken between doctors, written on a page or scratched out by a centuries-old fraud. Also worms. Worms mattered too. Guest writer Robin Mejia takes us with her to El Salvador and an agricultural education project. Despite continuing violence there, plenty of people still focus their energy on […]
Investigative journalists seem awfully glamorous – delving into mysteries and catching those liars at their game. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the aptitudes involved, so I steer clear of it. But recently I’ve had the thrill of that hunt in miniature. It all began when an editor sent me a link to the check above, […]
There’s a moment when you realize that you’ve become the person you hate. For me, it happened at the dinner table. I was telling (ok, ranting to) my husband about how my employer, FiveThirtyEight, has chosen to adopt as its house style the usage of the word data as a singular noun. “So you’ve become […]
Not long ago my father, who is 84, had a great fall. Great meaning bad. He doesn’t remember tripping on anything, just that suddenly he was on the floor of his bathroom. He’d hit his head on the corner of the sink. There was a lot of blood. A long hospital stay followed after surgery to […]
Ann: Some time ago, I got interested in why European languages so often use the same word for “story” and “history.” Every English speaker knows that having one word for two such different things — fiction and truth, respectively — is anathema. But my thinking didn’t go much farther than that, it rarely does. So […]
Agricultural engineer Irene Varela is a compelling presence. Six farmers are gathered on the patio of a church library in Santiago Texacuangos in El Salvador, about an hour outside the country’s capital for a workshop she’s leading. “What’s the soil like when you have worms?” Varela asks in Spanish. “Moist,” says one famer. “Rich,” says […]
August 17 – 21, 2015 It was a week of people changing their minds. Except for Cameron’s kids, they didn’t budge. Magical thinking works, says guest Heather Abel. For decades, she was able to stop tsunamis before they hit her. Now, though, the grand and calming ocean stops them for her. Even out in the […]