Browse Topics
Happiness
Seven Days In A Sea-Creature Town
Decorah sat in the impact crater of an asteroid that had struck the earth hundreds of millions of years ago. One of the extinct giant sea creatures exhumed from its crust — the shrimp-looking Pentecopterus decorahensis — had been named after the town.
November 2019
The Extra Year: Selected Poems
— from “Almost Done” | My wife has taken Pepper to the vet this morning. She is losing her hair, doesn’t like her food, has growths on her skin, moves slowly after eighty-four dog years.
October 2019On The Shore
I could never stay long enough on the shore; the tang of the untainted, fresh, and free sea air was like a cool, quieting thought.
Helen Keller
August 2019
The Happy Vertex
(As Explained In A Letter To My Son)
You see that the cruelty of the Happy Vertex is its fleeting nature. Line A plunges downward, line B eventually plateaus, and before you know it, the distractions take over, and you’re thinking about girls, or you take a brief but intense interest in Mazda Miatas. Soon you’ll think about money, nothing but money.
July 2019
It’s All Happening To All Of Us, All Of The Time
It is impossible to be a human being connected by affection to others and not be vulnerable to pains beyond our own.
May 2019When He Was Gone
I felt I was supposed to pretend I was a little sad he was gone — at least, for the first few days. I told him I missed him, because I did. I’m not a complete monster.
May 2019
My Book Life
A book’s characters always wait for us. No matter what happens to me during the day, Kerouac remains exactly where he was yesterday. He never moves without my permission. I reanimate him at my whim.
May 2019
Ways To Take Your Coffee
With snow falling on blue spruce and a cardinal at the feeder and the fireplace’s crackly warmth easing into your bones and the final pages of a book about bears and the opening pages of a book about monks and no plans for the morning, the afternoon, the evening, tomorrow, next week, the rest of your life.
March 2019Filling The Void
Bruce K. Alexander On How Our Culture Is Making Us Addicted
If we focus on people who are using opiates . . . we can say there’s an upsetting, awful addiction problem with them, over there, and deal with it in a prohibitive manner. In this way we minimize our vast social problems.
March 2019Nomads
Einstein said that time moves at different rates throughout the universe. He must have been to Mexico, where time not only moves slower but has an altogether different texture and flavor than American time.
January 2019
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today