So when I published an essay during the summer of Barbenheimer that braided my nuclear obsession with my past grief, ...

An interesting thing about your book is how you blend your role as a scientist with your role as a policymaker. You write about it not in a dry, college textbook-y way, but as a person, and as a ...

Birds began populating my own dreams. A great blue heron glided across the sky of my mind, slow and prehistoric, carrying the world on her back. A million sandhill cranes unspooled from the horizon, ...

MY BOSS AND I SIT in his extended cab, Dunkin’ coffee in big cupholders, and our only common interest: making furniture. We arrive in the Far Rockaways after spending five hours with nothing to talk ...

AFTER ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF of dating, Sam and I decided he should move into my house. We had each lived with partners before, but those moves had been swayed by financial stress and global ...

THE CHICKEN WAS UNWELL. She no longer ran to the summons of the leftovers pail to scratch at the compost heap with the other hens. Morning found her in a corner of the henhouse facing the wall, with ...

“HERE’S MY THEORY,” I say, sitting on my heels in between rows of cabbage seedlings. “Time isn’t shaped like a line. It moves in one direction, maybe, but that’s all the line has going for it. I think ...

THE FIRST SOUND IN the universe is joylessly underwhelming: white noise boring through the taffy-stretch of nascent space. The big bang is not a bang but a droning robotic purr, galaxies expanding ...

The Course: How to Make Luck: Writing in Praise of the Ordinary With so many things to worry over, we need to keep finding joy and celebrating gratitude.

Reflections on time, aging, and Monet's cataracts5. WATER LILIES AND LOTUS FLOWERS —the way they rise through the mud, opening into beautiful blooms—symbolize transcendence and rebirth. I read ...

IN OUR FREE TIME, WE DESTROY TREES. Hundreds of them by now. Five years ago, soon after I bought the place, I gave my partner a Husqvarna 450 Rancher for Christmas. Since then, he’s had to replace the ...

Salt marshes—often trampled, built on, and filled in—are giant, silent carbon sinks. On their oversized and under appreciated role in the health of our planet.