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Alcoholism
The Art Of Living
My fly line unspools across the water like a long sentence / whose final punctuation is a grizzly hackle tied by a friend. / He clamped his fly vise to the branch of a fallen pine / right after we arrived by mule train at this Montana river.
August 2023What I Don’t Tell My Wife
There are many things I don’t tell my wife of ten years: Because she has asked me not to. Because she carries her own burdens. Because she has told me mine are too much.
August 2023Portrait Of US
Monica Jane Frisell and Adam Scher have been traveling the U.S. in their “nomadic photo ark” . . . . attempting to find evidence of what we share by making large-format portraits of Americans from different states and recording short audio interviews with them.
June 2023Learning The Hard Way
Hitching a ride, trusting a partner, marrying the same person three times
September 2022Hey, Man
You’d donated most of your organs, so the body in your coffin was basically a scarecrow version of you. . . . Thank God they don’t do brain transplants, I thought. Anybody who’d gotten your brain would’ve woken up from surgery a total asshole. I heard you laughing at this. I could remember your laugh really well. It was a letdown that I could hear it only in my head.
August 2022Blue Ladder
My uncle finally kicked me out, and I was living in the twenty-four-hour Kroger on Fairhaven Avenue in Tustin, California, pilfering food and sleeping at the coffee bar. One day Mr. Muniz pushed a cart through the frozen-foods section where I was fanning myself, and he stopped. I’d gotten ugly, my face wasn’t right, and I could tell he was thinking, What the hell?
August 2022In Vino Veritas
Edward Slingerland On The Hidden Truths About Our Relationship With Alcohol
What if . . . our taste for alcohol has been strengthened and preserved in our gene pool for functional reasons? Then we might look at intoxication not as a side note but as part of the story of what makes us human.
June 2022Ten Years Sober
We all need to accept that the world at large is indifferent to our existence. Most of our decisions matter only to us. I could drink tonight, and no one would know.
June 2022Emotional Morons
Kayla and I were not friends, so when she called me out of the blue, on a blistering July morning, to ask if I wanted to join her and her dad on the lake for the day, it was like NASA calling to invite me to the moon.
June 2022