With Liberty and Salmonella for All Well, July 4th is coming up. I guess it’s time to dust off the Lee Greenwood cassette and celebrate the freest place on earth! I’m speaking of Finland of course. Finding a metric of freedom is difficult. I like using the nonpartisan Freedom House which scores political rights and […]
Shirley Jackson’s Lottery as Allegory for Fraud Prevention Laws (I’m going to spoil an eight-page short story easily found on the internet, so maybe read that first if you haven’t already read The Lottery.) The Lottery is set in a small, unnamed, presumably American community where inhabitants are excitedly gearing up for the annual event […]
A Day in the Olympic Peninsula This is an excerpt from an upcoming nonfiction book titled Hermit Crabs that chronicled a year-long trip in a travel trailer with my family of five people. Lauren is my wife, and my three boys are named Wolf, Bear, and Lynx. This excerpt was about a day spent on […]
Comédie des Toilettes I find my cross-cultural comparisons spend a lot of time on issues related to the bathroom. This isn’t out of an overtly crude sense of humor; it is merely that, from my experience, failure to quickly understand local cultural mores on waste disposal will inevitably result in disaster. Whether it is navigating […]
The Cacophony As much preparation as I put into being a dad, I continue to be surprised at the variety and volume of noises that are produced by my three spawn. One kid was easy. We rocked out together, most notably to Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song in which he would do a pitchy but generally […]
The Littlest Insurgent In between larger projects, I am always working on silly short stories. My fourth collection will be out sometime in 2026. This short story was inspired by a quip in my parenting memoir, Parenting as a Contact Sport in which I compared babies at naptime to the Taliban. As a linguist, I […]
Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter. I wanted to create a space where I can reach out directly to people who might be interested in what I have to say. I have relied primarily on Facebook for the last several years, but their algorithm buries anything that is more than a few hundred […]
*** 4 AM Wakeup. It’s 90 minutes to the trailhead and I’d like to start before daybreak, finding my way by the earliest signs of morning light. All three kids are asleep and the first thing to do is to move them inside the truck. The oldest wakes up, briefly. The other two are like […]
Not long ago, I was startled by a friend describing her afternoon of knocking down wasp nests. I would describe this person as left-of-center, concerned about climate change, and other issues regarding our inability to live within the earth’s carrying capacity. It didn’t compute that knocking down wasp nests would be part of the day’s […]
This is one of my favorite essays. It was written by Pat Conroy in 1973. I post it here for the purpose of social commentary in an upcoming book about a year-long trip around the country. Such publication is covered under Fair Use Doctrine and is not a copyright violation. The Horse is a sacred […]