Columns

All summer I found thousands of four-leaf clovers. I had been living at a firehouse since COVID-19 broke out, volunteering as a paramedic. One slow shift, my EMT partner Sam and I found a couch on a grassy hill overlooking a leveled...

Well, not quite at sea—docked off Singapore’s coast aboard a cruise ship devoid of passengers, waiting to set sail for America on a test voyage.

Felicia had spent her first days back on the job quarantined in her cabin. In the weeks that...

My old friend, It’s not so simple as “I miss you.”

I can’t tell you why I rented the theater downtown, other than that it was inevitable, like the notes of a song. Facing the rows of empty velvet seats, I felt the thrust of potential. At night, doctors stood on stage telling stories—not of...

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “that perches in the soul.” The avian image is both lovely and apposite, for as a bird goes winging off at the first loud noise or sight of a predator, so hope—an aspect of desire, a...

This past summer, “murder hornets” became high-profile pests, joining the ranks of monarch butterflies and bumblebees as insects that capture our attention.

I became a citizen of the United States on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, holding my newborn daughter. 

The face mask, that simple piece of cloth, has become fraught territory. Over the summer, Americans began reading the use or absence of a mask as a political statement, a commentary on individual freedom, an invitation to a fight. Our...