We are emotionally available, we have words to express our feelings. We rally for our friend in need. We are men. I can’t trust her. You shouldn’t trust her. She’s admitted to everything I’ve found out but nothing more. You’ve got her cornered. She’s on the defensive. She won’t even talk to me. Let’s have a beer. I’m a mess right now. I’m in a bad space and it feels like it will never end. We can...
I hear the jagged revving of chainsaws in my neighborhood and I head outside to investigate. A few houses down the block from mine a tree removal crew is on the job, a crane extending high into the canopy, a chipper idling in the road ready to chomp. Multiple trees are being taken down in the front of one of the shadiest houses on the block. Towering, majestic oaks I’ve always admired. They must...
An essay published by the bipartisan think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) discussed the challenge of surprising your enemy in a military attack in the twenty-first century. Back in the day, it was easier to pull off a military shocker. Case in point: the United States was woefully unprepared for the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. But today...
Since the day I was old enough to stray from my mother’s watchful eye and wander off from our blanket spread on the sandy, modest public beach at Thunder Bay on the shore of Lake Erie in Canada, I would take beach walks along the curve of the bay. Walk east, and you come across Root Beer Creek, so named by us for its water color. Walk west, and you come across a flat rock area abutting the shore...
One of my favorite punctuation marks—the em dash—(see what I did there?) is under siege. I’ve made liberal use of the em dash in all five of my novels, deploying it early and often in my writing style: STASH (page 1): “But she reminded herself that Nora was only seven, a loving, intelligent girl, tall and strong and for the most part capable, yet fearful of small things going wrong—such as...
I only recently discovered a term for a phenomenon I’ve experienced many times, one we’ve all experienced—hedonic adaptation. I’ve known about hedonism, which is living to maximize pleasure, and I’m acquainted with several hedonists who have devoted their lives to pleasure, but hedonic adaptation is new for me. Hedonic adaptation is the process by which we tend to return to our baseline level...
It’s been a while since I’ve found a novel so compelling that I knocked off one hundred pages a day and finished reading the book in three days. Flesh, by David Szalay, is that novel. A reviewer in The Guardian wrote that Flesh is “a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat.” The...
Nature handed us cold, wind, and rain the entire time, and yet the turnout for Hands Off at the New York State Capitol looked to be several thousand Americans who are sick and tired of an authoritarian administration run by a cruel, amoral, abusive, lying felon and his billionaire enablers. Despite the weather, the crowd was enthusiastic, the signs plentiful and creative. The faces I saw were...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the U.S. scientific and regulatory agency that studies and predicts changes in the environment. The agency’s mission includes weather forecasts, storm warnings, and climate monitoring. Management of coastal and marine ecosystems. Prevention and control of invasive species. International cooperation. NOAA also collects, analyzes, and...
The scent of certain simmering sauce transforms me into that child, that teen, again. I arrive home from school, maybe on a cold, slushy day, I push open the heavy door and immediately I know. My mother turns from the stove in her striped apron and wooden spoon. Sauce tonight. Or it’s a spring day and the windows are open, I’m dragging down the last block to my house after two hours on the water...
After winning the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel, “Orbital,” Samantha Harvey said in an interview with the Guardian, “When I’m down here on Earth, I find it difficult to be consoled by the things that we’re doing to the Earth and to one another. But when I zoom out, I can feel something that more resembles peace. I can look at it almost without judgment, just look at its beauty.” I...
The vampire never ceases to both fascinate and repulse. Eastern European folklore offered tales of reanimated corpses and blood-drinking spirits. In 1819, John Polidori’s The Vampyre was the first published vampire story. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), still widely read today, established many enduring vampire tropes such as vulnerability to sunlight and the power of seduction. In modern times...
It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the hot, urgent Santa Ana foehn winds fueled devastating fires in the Los Angeles area. But this most recent episode might be the most horrific of all, arriving on the tail of an extremely dry season and following the hottest year ever on record. This isn’t a forest fire burning acres of trees in a remote area; this one is burning houses...
I’ve been reading novels from the past that I believe could never be published today due to potential cultural appropriation, offensiveness, misogynistic themes, lack of political correctness, or some other enlightened objection that has diluted the variety and depth of what major publishing houses are bringing to the market and serves as a supply side-form of book censorship. But that’s just my...
We’re gathering with friends to ring in the New Year, and with every person I corner into a conversation I bring up the topic of New Year’s Resolutions. You can learn a lot about someone when you ask if they have resolutions. I hear some of the standard popular resolutions: getting more fit, being more mindful and grateful, helping others, spending more time with family, etc. A few of us wanted...
