The other day I had a small, suspicious thought. What if some of us are a little bit addicted to sadness? Not the catastrophic kind.Not the kind that requires medical intervention and casseroles. I mean the specific, curated sadness many of us seem to carry around like a […]
Every morningthe birds begin their meetingbefore I do. They chirp with an enthusiasmthat feels slightly unnecessaryfor 6:07 a.m. Outside my windowthey are holding some sort of conferenceabout joy. I listen. But the strange thing isI knowthey are not singing to me. They are singing to a lifehappening somewhere […]
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope recently spotted something about 300 million light-years away that feels oddly familiar to modern humans: a galaxy that is mostly invisible, a little mysterious, and apparently made almost entirely of Dark Matter. In other words, a cosmic entity that is technically there, […]
I read A Confederacy of Dunces years ago and thought it was hilarious. Now I think it’s prophetic. Back then, Ignatius J. Reilly felt like an exaggerated character. He is a pompous, self-righteous, overeducated man ranting about society’s collapse while blaming his digestive system for everything. Today he […]
There is a small monkey in Japan who briefly broke the internet because he coped with loneliness the way many of us secretly do: he found something soft and held on tight. Punch, a young monkey at Ichikawa Zoo, was spotted clinging to a plush toy for comfort […]
There are people who cry at weddings. People who cry at movies. People who cry at tax season. I cry at dog stories. A heroic dog.A rescued dog.A dog reunited with its human.A dog wearing a tiny raincoat. I am emotionally available for all of it. So when […]
Somewhere along the evolutionary timeline, humans went from inventing tools to naming them. Not in a practical way. Not in a “this is my truck, Bessie” kind of way. No. We are now giving delivery robots faces, personalities, and apparently emotional backstories. Little sidewalk robots are trundling around […]
This weekend I began spring cleaning, not because I am virtuous or organized or suddenly one of those people who labels their spices. No. I started cleaning because my brain was full. Overfull. Like a Manhattan closet. Like my inbox. Like my emotional support tote bag that contains […]
Scientists recently thawed bacteria trapped in ice for something like thirteen thousand years inside Scărișoara Cave in Romania, which is already the kind of sentence that makes me feel like humanity is poking at something that should have stayed in a locked narrative box labeled Do Not Disturb. […]
Lately the news has felt like a slow drumbeat of mortality. You see familiar faces. People you grew up watching, people who seemed woven into the background of your life and suddenly their names are trending next to words like illness, cancer, ALS, loss. You see names like […]
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