When I was in 8th grade – I think it was 8th grade – we had to do some public speaking. One of our speeches had to be an explanation of something, and I chose to explain the layout of the streets of Washington, D.C. Today, I can’t imagine how I went on for multiple minutes about this, even figuring in the time to mess with the opaque...

Call no man happy until he is dead. The phrase is a bit like an optical illusion: its meaning depends on the psychological topography of the person who is looking at the words. Some people see: “Life is suffering that only ends when you are dead”. Others see: “Even if things are good now, the next calamity could always be just around the corner”....

My dear friend “P” is a bit of a nut. She’s always doing a million things at once. The piles on her dining-room table are epic. At least two laptops are open with projects in progress at any one time. It’s fair to say she over-commits to the point of madness: She is the leader of this or that task force, the head of this or that committee, the...

It was a warm July evening, and we left the living room window open so the cats could lounge in the screened in porch. As usual, my teenage son went to bed around midnight, hours after I had turned in.  At 1:30am I heard a frantic chittering noise from behind his closed door. He was calling out from under his covers while a panicked bat...

Yesterday afternoon, all at once, my son and I started to feel a little sluggish. For me, a little afternoon slump isn’t so surprising. But for a kid who’s usually climbing up doorjambs, ripping off pull-ups, or teaching himself how to do a corkscrew flip on the trampoline, it’s weird. But there we were in the climbing gym (see above)...

A couple of weeks ago, during a backpacking trip in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, Elise and I shared our campsite with a short-tailed weasel. He, or she, was lithe and frolicsome, darting over rocks and flowing around the trunks of lodgepoles in relentless pursuit of squirrels. Weasels have a sort of split reputation — they are, in our imaginations,...