Twenty-one years ago, Domino’s Pizza ran a fairly mundane promotion: customers who purchased a large one-topping pizza would also receive an order of cheesy bread, on the house. This event would not have even registered for me, or anyone I knew, had Domino’s not advertised it like this:
Behavior
Brown Penguins are black and white—everyone knows this—except when they aren’t, like in April, at a place called Punta Tombo. Punta Tombo is a gnarled peninsula in southern Argentina that hosts a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Every September, more than two hundred thousand of them come here to breed. They pair up, lay a […]
This post first appeared in July 2016 and sadly, this is the kind of story we are still having to tell. I was with a group kayaking and camping on the coast of south-central Alaska — seven adults, five kids from four years old to twelve. One of the adults was a muscular late-20s man named Everett, […]
I was having an email exchange with a longtime friend a few months ago, and we got to talking about our long-ago youth—specifically, the workplace where we met, when we were both in our teens. As is often the case in these late-evening conversations, the discussion turned to the subject of who else among us […]
My wife pieced together a kill in our driveway, sending me pictures of deer tracks posed in a casual walk followed by a sprawl, deer fur in the snow, and faint signs of melt, a couple hours old at most. The next picture was of cat tracks the size of an adult human palm, a […]
Last night I spent time with a friend who doesn’t have a cell phone. Can you imagine that? He shrugged and said he finds he doesn’t really need one. He had a flip phone for a while, then 3G went offline and he decided not to re-up. I wanted to cling to the hem of […]
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 […]
“Is it okay to still have children?” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked her social media followers in 2019. She was addressing a growing reluctance among young people to consider parenting; both because of concerns about overpopulation and because of concerns about what kind of world new children would be coming into. This openness about rethinking parenthood […]