The guy on the TV screen tells me two things I didn’t know. One, I almost certainly have a skunk under my house because in winter that’s where skunks go, under houses. And two, if I don’t already own a Skunkinator, I need to run out and get one right now. Salesman he is, but the way he phrases it is more like two of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: We...
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For a long time everything was colored by the public violence of that death. We saw it: Jackie, her pink suit splattered with blood, crawling across the back of the convertible. We saw it in photographs in the pages of Life magazine, and later on television, and we were children. When Vietnam became the first televised war, the precedent had been set: We...
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Stephen Eginoire is a small man with abundant hair and a rock climber’s sense of fashion. He seems uncomfortable around the microphone, as if it might turn and devour him. It is Thursday evening at the Museum of Northern Arizona and Stephen is at the podium, leading us down into a world beneath the world, a photographic journey into the caves and aquifers...
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The following piece first appeared in this publication in February of 2020. It seems even more relevant now than it did then, which is why I’ve chosen to offer it again. It turns out Henry VIII was not a very nice guy. Living in the dark ages of human history that preceded tweeting, his version of the short and nasty was to chop off your head. Or...
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There must be a Norwegian proverb predicting luck or misfortune for anyone caught in a flooding event in New York City and thereby missing their plane to Oslo. My father drove and swore as the station wagon kicked up plumes of rainwater along the highway-turned-river. If it was misfortune that the plane had departed when we finally arrived at Kennedy...
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