My daughter has a well-loved copy of Richard Scarry’s book, What Do People Do All Day? The book, first published in 1968, shows all the workers in Busytown at their various jobs. Kids love it. Adults love it. Four and a quarter stars on Goodreads. But 1968 was a long time ago, a different era. […]
A couple of months ago, my husband and I drove into the Sonoran desert. We were in pursuit of the weird, heading for a mountain celebrating God’s love and constructed almost entirely out of latex paint. We left Palm Springs and drove south toward the Salton Sea.
This post originally ran April 3, 2014. I’ve added a brief update at the end. Yellowstone National Park spans three states and nearly 3,500 square miles, making it one of the largest parks in the US. So when I read that Montana officials are searching for a home for 135 Yellowstone bison living on Ted Turner’s sprawling private […]
This post originally ran in 2013, and issue I address — protecting the anonymity of egg (and sperm) donors — has yet to be resolved. Earlier this year the New York Times ran a story about a woman who had a child thanks to a sperm donor, and then identified that child’s paternal grandmother via […]
This post originally ran in March 2014. Although tuberculosis cases are on the decline in the United States, we’re not headed for elimination, at least not this century. There were more than 9,000 cases in 2018, mostly among foreign-born individuals. But the news isn’t all bad: In August, the Food and Drug Administration approved a […]
Yesterday was National Dog Day, so I thought it only appropriate to repost this story about my dog and her insatiable appetite. She’s five now, and still insatiable. Perhaps there was a time when our dog, Bea, didn’t eat everything. If so, I don’t remember it. At first, we thought it might be a puppy […]
For every story that makes it to print, there are scads that die in the reporting trenches. This is one of those stories. It originally ran in October 2013. In 2001, I moved to Bolivia to become a Peace Corps volunteer and fell deeply in love with the country. In 2010, I returned. I wanted […]
Last year, my husband and I set off on a camping adventure in Montana. We canoed to a remote site on Cliff Lake, an expanse of water that formed atop a geologic fault. The sun shone. The water was an impossible shade of aquamarine. Eagles perched atop dead trees. It was pretty damn perfect. That […]