They're coming back. Armed with cactus-like spines, battle axes, sending their weapons long-range to drift in the autumn winds, the weeds are reclaiming fields of soybeans, corn, and cotton, reclaiming fields they've been exterminated from…
Posts published in “Essays”
Does it seem like more and more of the homeless are accompanied by a dog or dogs? The City of San Francisco has just initiated a program that pairs the homeless with abandoned puppies. The…
Just under a century ago, following the carnage of WWI, an influenza pandemic swept over much of the planet, killing over 50 million people — more than three times the number killed in the war itself. Soldiers and others moving around globally were a crucial factor in the spread of the flu virus, even though transportation was nowhere near as efficient and far-reaching as it is today.
Last night by the fire, our new (old) house enshrouded in dense fog, I said to Marcia that I didn't feel we were on the land where this house sits but rather on a boat, or possibly a raft, floating somewhere on the ocean of existence.
110 maxims about civility and decent behavior in public which originated in the late 16th century in France were popularly circulated in Virginia during George Washington's boyhood in the first half of the 18th century.…
Two days, two hours each day re-dialing, letting the phone ring at the French Laundry. Finally a voice at the other end. A recorded voice anyway, telling me how to go about making a reservation at the French Laundry.
Writers and filmmakers have long liked apocalyptic stories. In the last century the dominant cause of the end of humanity became a nuclear holocaust, but a giant asteroid hitting Earth has also been popular. And then there are those pesky zombies. That's science fiction — so far — but out in the real world, it might well be that the most likely cause of our specie's demise will be a microscopic bug we cannot defeat, and that we vanish, or vastly diminish, not with a bang but a whimper.