Category: Essays

  A friend asked me to tell him a childhood story of wind and I told him of standing on the red cinderblock retaining wall next to the garage when I was ei...

  Today I bought a buttery bouclé sweater in a town I’ve no connection to at all. I was home visiting my sister, Amy, in Minnesota.  I live in New Yo...

The first surviving photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras, was taken in 1826 (or maybe 1827—it’s not entirely clear) by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. He was 61...

  I open the album, really a set of blank three-ring notebook pages in a simple gray binder. I made several such albums that year, this one devoted to my h...

  Day 1. A quiet day. A disturbing night. When, around 10pm, a siren sounds, I’m dumbfounded. I wrongly thought the night before was a one-off, random rock...

You’re in your room with your sister when your mom barges in the front door, wailing. At first it sounds like the chatter of her usual arriving-home routine—cac...

  Seated on his white bucket, Vincent gives Girl the benefit of his righteous insight. “What you need in this order is God in your life and a man, a man to...

    It was July, and in June I had learned Gardner had bone marrow cancer and would die. When I imagined him dead, my life seemed treeless and gray. I...

  1 In space, the hearts of astronauts become rounder.  According to the scientists who have studied this phenomenon, the hearts of those who spend long pe...

  My first time was with an Atari 2600. I was six. We were introduced by Chris Moran, a mutual friend who’d already exposed me to numerous cultural staples...