The end of the year is a time for lists. Our Ten Favorite Books, Twelve Movies We Loved, Twenty-Seven TikToks that Perfectly Captured the National Mood in 2022. We’re a society obsessed with rankings — with the quantification of media, the comparison of culture, the litanization of everything. We writers are the worst of the […]
Animals
This is Part II of my heart-filling conversation with Sabrina Imbler (they/them), a poet, essayist, science writer, and author of the forthcoming collection HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. If you missed Part I last month, you can read it here. Kate: What was the fact-checking process like for this […]
Last month I went to Arizona on a reporting trip. One afternoon excursion took me to the eastern Patagonia Mountains, the rolling dun-colored range that aligns with one segment of the United States’ border with Mexico. I walked through oak-juniper woodlands alive with gray foxes and Coues deer, a small, desert-adapted subspecies of whitetail. Tufty […]
After a long, miserable summer of illness, I’m back, and I’ve got something extra-marvelous to share: an interview with Sabrina Imbler (they/them), a fellow poet/essayist/science writer and the author of the forthcoming collection HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. Our conversation about writing, publishing, and (what else?) marine invertebrates was […]
This concerns the burned out hulk of a ponderosa pine that bears have taken an interest in, sculpted, really. I recently saw this smoldered-black tree on a backpack with two friends in Western Colorado. The walk took four days with no human trails to speak of, so when we arrived, we were well away from […]
The last time I saw my brother’s dog — 14.5 years old, scruffy fur, splayed hips, milky eyes — I cupped her muzzle in my hand and told her she was a Good Girl. I had a feeling it might be the last time I would scratch her head. She stared into my eyes. Wrigley […]
While visiting the Baltic seacoast of Lithuania a couple weeks ago, walking with my wife among hills of half-grassy sand dunes, I heard what I swore were sandhill cranes. I scanned an October sky pillared with distant cumulus until finding giant letters written high overhead, southward V’s and W’s a hundred yards long. Sandhill cranes […]