As a kid I loved carnivals. They were bright, flashy and noisy, and everywhere you looked there was a promise of instant gratification: eat this, throw this, win this, ride this — all designed to…
Posts published in “Essays”
The turn-off from New York State Route 86 towards the parking lot at the northern entrance to the Adirondacks High Peaks Wilderness comes in the town of North Elba just past John Brown’s farm. The…
The trails of the Adirondacks Park are a disgrace. For years I’ve been coming with one or both of my daughters to these mountains for an annual thirty-mile circuit around the Great Range, a loop…
If you think you have the best dog in the world you probably do. Here’s the deal: Everyone’s dog, including yours, is the best dog in the whole wide world. People love their cocker spaniels…
I decided Ramparts Magazine should check out the roots of the New Jerusalem. The question was what, if anything, the hippie phenomena represented besides a pleasant excursion into love, fun and flowers by the overprivileged…
Tracey crept up on you bit by bit. Eventually, you’d sense yourself relenting. The fastidious rational brain no longer bothered calculating how much of his rap was mythological, which anecdotes apocryphal, or what percentage of…
For all their breathtaking immensity, dams are oddly vulnerable things—a vulnerability that is shared and greatly intensified among the millions of people who depend on them. The engineers who have built them have gone to…