Letter from Home | A collection of essays originally written for Flagstaff Live!

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Mile Markers

Mile Markers

Posted by on Feb 9, 2023

By the time I got to The Drive, I’d gotten damn used to small-d driving: all those errands through suburban mall-land, returning home late through the mercury-vapor streets after nights out with friends in some Chicago neighborhood or other, the longer expeditions that took varied combinations of friends, often overnight, to visit someone at a college in...

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How to write this column

How to write this column

Posted by on Dec 29, 2022

Every six weeks, when my time in the lineup comes up, the same question arises, or set of questions: What to write about, and how to write about it? So I went to the hot new tool of the moment: ChatGPT. ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence writing software that has set academia abuzz, mainly in an alarmed way, because of its great potential to create...

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Normal

Posted by on Nov 17, 2022

When I was a kid normal was both a state of being and a place. The place was easier to define. It was a town, for one thing, and it could be found on one of those folded (paper!) highway maps that could be acquired at gas stations: there it was, smack-dab in the middle of the great flatness of Illinois. Corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn; there wasn’t...

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Emporiums

Emporiums

Posted by on Sep 29, 2022

emporium n. Pl. -iums, -ia. [L f. Gk emporion, f. emporos merchant, per- to journey.] 1 A centre of commerce; a market. 2 A shop, esp. one that sells unusual or fancy goods. Chiefly joc. Of all the impacts of the COVID pandemic, one of the most enduring is—in my eyes—an increased awareness of the churning of stuff in the world or the way material goods do...

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Being Local

Being Local

Posted by on Aug 11, 2022

It was almost on a whim that we decided, propelled by the latest bout of COVID claustrophobia, to spend a week this summer on the California coast. A day’s drive, no air travel, a rental within earshot of the surf: it was the easiest means we could manage for getting to a dramatically different ecosystem. At intervals I could not predict the fog rolled in...

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