The calendar read September, but the air was muggy and still when my wife and I had the good fortune this month to visit Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece of a house that is considered by more than one expert to be one of America’s greatest contributions to world architecture. It’s in Pennsylvania—deeply rural Pennsylvania, that is, where it...
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It must have been 1990 when I encountered the writing of Charles Bowden for the first time, not coincidentally when I first found myself traipsing around the Sonoran Desert in winter and early spring. For a young man from the suburban Midwest the scenery was a revelation: mountains stood like purple cardboard cutouts on dawn horizons, then transformed...
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During the same week in June, two freakish things happened. A rare but welcome incursion of monsoon moisture entered Arizona from the south, scattering welcome showers across parched forest and grassland, but also throwing down lightning bolts that set off dozens of wildfires. Elon Musk, meanwhile, became the world’s first trillionaire, reaching an...
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There isn’t a lot of time for reflection as the spring semester winds down, so thick is the calendar with projects and presentations and heaps of grading decisions to make, but in late April there were some mornings when the cool temperatures and bursting green leaves brought to mind wistful thoughts of a long-ago spring that for me was also defined by the...
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I first heard about the Master of Liberal Studies program at NAU not long after I moved to Flagstaff, in the person of a woman whom I would eventually marry. Well, that sounds interesting, I thought, adding it to the list of things I found interesting about her. The program was focused on good and sustainable communities, she said. As a writer I loved the...
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