In June I spent a few days in the suburbs just east of Oceanside, California. (I actually just dedicated five minutes to figuring out whether it was actually Oceanside or Carlsbad, or Encintas, or Lake San Marcos, but we stayed in a nondescript chain hotel — a Hampton Inn? a Holiday Inn? a Marriott? — […]
Jane
As I write this, the air quality in New York City has taken a turn for the worst. Readings are in the 300s and the sky is that sickly orange. The smoke is the leading story on both the New York Times and the Washington Post homepages. On the Times’ site, there are blow-by-blow updates […]
There are things I have not revisited since spring 2020 because they remind me too much of the darkest days of the pandemic. Puzzles, for instance. I have not done a puzzle in three years, nor have I eaten frozen Costco salmon (my parents panic-bought us roughly a million fillets in mid-March, and it took […]
This was originally published in 2018, but I’ve been thinking about it for several reasons. First, because Catapult, the publication that ran this essay, is shuttering its delightful online magazine; second, because it was edited by the brilliant Nicole Chung, whose new book is out this week; and third, because I recently saw a venting […]
Six or seven years ago, I bought a small, lopsided aloe plant from a holiday market for $7. I have neglected it for years, never changing its soil and rarely giving it enough light. It grew more and more crooked, and last year, its leaves (wait, do aloe have leaves? the fact that I don’t […]
Perhaps this has happened to you before: you’re at a bus stop. You are — what else? — waiting for a bus. One pulls up, but it’s not the one you want, so you wave it on. It seems so obvious that it hardly bears explanation: of course you did not get on the wrong […]
The other day, a fellow writer shared a link to a residency opportunity in a science writing group. Like most residencies, the situation sounded ideal — a few weeks in an idyllic place where you’d have peace and quiet to delve into a big project and meet other writers. I looked at the logistics: the […]
Every morning, I wake up, make myself a cup of coffee, and open the Spelling Bee. For the uninitiated, Spelling Bee is a word game published daily by the New York Times, and the concept is delightfully simple: you are given seven letters arranged in the shape of a honeycomb, and you try to find […]