I have a policy: never read the comments. This rule applies to most of the publications where my work appears online, such as FiveThirtyEight, Slate and The Washington Post. (LWON is the exception. Comments left here require approval before they’re posted, and I read them all.) It might seem unfriendly to ignore people who are […]
Commentary
Ann: It’s been a fairly dreadful year, personally and nationally, and giving thanks is going to be a stretch. But even when I was a kid, I was thankless. When my grandfather said grace at Sunday dinners — “Bless, oh Lord, this food to our use and us to thy service” — I thought the […]
In light of who became president elect last week, I find myself searching for patterns to understand what might be happening, and what’s next. I don’t presume unrelated processes mirror each other, but there are uncanny resemblances. In this case, I believe Trump is the end of the Ice Age. He is — I believe, I hope […]
Today is Election Day in the United States. For the past several months, this election, the most brutal, mean-spirited, and frankly alarming in decades, has caused a wave of anxiety, dread, and bitterness to blanket the country like a kind of noxious psychic soot. The American Psychological Association reports that 52 percent of American adults say […]
With fewer than a dozen days left until Election Day, I’m having a hard time looking at the news. The blurzy noise of the past few months has become unbearable: polls, rigged elections, pantsuits, emails, orange, yelling, balloons. I’m still processing some of the answers I gave my ten-year old when she blurted out at […]
The title of this post is not metaphorical nor is it a misleading hook. I’ve got a sound on tape. It could be a ghost. What is a ghost? Science says no such thing exists. But in these thinning days of autumn, even diehards might glance up startled. What was that? If you want to skip this post […]
“The Silver Lake Wolves” sounds like the title of a young adult novel, or possibly an indie rock band with lots of close harmony and beards. Actually, it was the name given by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to a small family of wolves […]
This recent revelation about Donald Trump and crotch-grabbing has triggered an outpouring of stories and memories. I posted something on the matter on Facebook and people’s deeply sunken tales came out comment after comment. The same has happened on a national scale. People are stepping forward with their stories. A friend of mine, a touring […]