Yesterday we turned 10, which is like 120 in blog years. We’re celebrating all week with postcards we wrote to ourselves in May of 2010. Today Ann, Emma, and Cassie report back on the present to their younger selves, or at least offer a warning. Ann Finkbeiner In May, 2010, I was wondering whether the […]
Cassandra
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.
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 […]
This post originally ran November 22, 2016. In 2015, the National Institutes of Health announced the end of invasive chimpanzee research in the US. The agency had dramatically scaled back the program in 2013, and NIH director Francis Collins reported that due to lack of demand, he had decided to allow the remaining animals to retire as well. “It is clear […]
This post originally ran March 22, 2016. But it deals with a truly timeless topic: male masturbation. Gents, are you prone to fainting fits and epilepsy? Are you lacking “balmy and vital moisture”? Do you have weakness in the penis? Has your seed spawned sickly babes that either die quickly or always complain? Then you […]
This post originally ran April 25, 2017. It’s almost Earth Day again, and litter still seems like the least of our environmental concerns. On Saturday, Earth Day, I went for a run. About a mile in, I came upon a bald, middle-aged man. He wore a leather jacket and a Bluetooth headset. I was perhaps […]