Extra! Extra! Read All About It!
I raise a wistful glass to the days when neighborhood paper routes provided a bicycle-mounted kid’s first taste of financial independence.
Dear White People
Layers of irony form the crux of Dear White People’s satirical message: racism hounds us across generations, cultures, educational levels, socio-economic strata, and skin pigments.
Wine Before Breakfast
As worshippers trickle into the little sanctuary, we smile and nod our good-mornings. Our collective sleepiness encourages contemplative silence. The low lights glow gold off the bare wood floor.
A2
The past three months have swirled by in a flurry of skimmed articles, just-caught buses, and discussions over falafel and hummus about the drawbacks of capitalism.
A Muttering of Ducks
I fill a basket with crisp lettuce and Swiss chard. A raspberry finds its way into my mouth. I close my eyes, breathe deep, and finally feel my shoulders relax.
Photo Booth
The video-photo-flipbook booth was a hit. Even my 91-year-old grandfather got in on the action—twice. Milling guests flaunted their flipbooks, the brief sequences looping like analog Vines.
Wait For It…
I sat back, dumbfounded, as these realizations came trickling in. I felt a little sheepish that it took so long for me to figure it out. God got a well-deserved slow clap.
Face Forward
Suddenly there are more things on my face that could go wrong. Is my mascara giving me a black eye? Did my lipstick make friends with my teeth? Does my eyeliner make me look like King Tut?
Life to the Fullest
The next time you feel lonely, remember that between one and three percent of your body is composed of total strangers. And that’s 1014 bacteria for every one of those 7.2 billion people.
A Klingon and a Ferengi Walk into a Bar…
Maybe the purpose of the show isn’t to revel in physical extremes, but to explore how creatures with disparate values interact and find common ground.
Grace Under Pressure
Harvests were tallied. And fruit farmers hauled in a bumper crop of blueberries, apples, and peaches—the pent-up energies of their formerly ravaged orchards.
Thin Air
What good is all this technology—our GPS satellites, our naval cruisers, our sonar arrays and passport checks and aerial photographs—if it can’t produce real answers?
Kiss the Sky
Skaters face skull-cracking ice and flying metal blades; lugers zoom at 80 miles per hour. Hockey players lose teeth, skiers blow out knees.
Stayin’ Alive
It’s Tuesday evening at the Southeast YMCA, and my squats are getting shallower. Cindi, the weight-training instructor, wanders through the crowded room, counting reps, shouting encouragement.
A Ship-Shape Church
We come to church expecting to be fed—physically with coffee and cookies, spiritually with a rousing sermon. We come expecting to be entertained by talented musicians and a skillful preacher.
Father, Son, and Holy Jokes
As autumn fell, he started nudging me, gently striving to get my attention. Geneva, he whispered, you’ve been running in circles for months. We haven’t talked in a while.
Supernatural
One fateful night during my junior year, I was roaming around on Netflix, hunting for distractions. I’d recently finished watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I was in the mood for new fantasy adventures. I’d always loved reading stories about dragons and knights,...
Dynamic Equilibrium
Ecologists hold that patches of land, when stripped of vegetation by natural or human processes, recover by shifting through a fairly predictable series of plant and animal communities.
Intersections
Bridges I have aplenty. What I crave is intersections. Intersections—those moments of synchrony, of serendipity, of crazy coincidence.
Joe Pilates
Now, you might be thinking, here’s another fitness nut gearing up to write glib posts about the joys of physical exercise. I am not that nut.
