The world is on fire. Across the seven continents of Htrae, an evil cadre of twisted nobles and their cultish followers, in their greed and their corruption, have begun to break down the best systems of an already imperfect world. It is a...
Although I’m disinclined to take bagged trash to the dump on Sunday, a day I reserve for worship and the fullest possible enjoyment of the pleasures that inspire it, I do spend part of most Sundays picking up litter along the dirt road I...
When was the first prayer? Was it immediate, a direct appeal, like Abraham’s plea that God spare Sodom? Or was it asymptotic, a request that the petitioner be somehow granted an exemption from the world’s sorrows?
In 2022, with no formal training, no understanding of my visual-art skills, and a deep yearning to be vulnerable again in my studio practice, I became a cartoonist.
The third time I go to meet the devil, I pay better attention to the legend and visit on Halloween. The day is either cliché or the deep human instinct that there are times in the year when it is wise to fear.
The email was innocuous enough. A woman wrote to me explaining how her partner had been talking about my work and how much he’d enjoyed it—in particular, he’d remembered me giving a TEDx talk about ghosts and hauntings. He’d tried to show...
Miyu studies the miniature refrigerator, which is small enough to fit in the palm of her hand; the calendar on the wall with its pages frozen in thought; a round clock the size of a thumbnail with its arms stilled at 1:25. Miniatures like...
A few years ago, I traveled to Skovsbostrand on the island of Funen in my native Denmark to write in a solitary residence by the sea. It was winter, too cold to sit in the garden among the priestly Eranthis and flocks of snowdrops, their...
Periodical cicadas do not rely on camouflage to survive. They overwhelm their predators with numbers, billions of them crawling out of dime-size holes in the ground, an evolutionary strategy known among biologists as “predator satiation.”
In the eerie, quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s 2021, halfway through a Fulbright to Hungary, I went to a medical clinic in Budapest to have a lump in my breast examined. I wasn’t too worried. I was young, it was probably a cyst...
