Stories

I unexpectedly found myself in a personal experiment on my recent trip to Copenhagen: eating breakfast by candlelight. What a contrast to my usual jumping out of bed at 5am, turning on every lamp and spotlight I find on my way to the kitchen. In this moment of slowing...

Bob is a scientist, a computer scientist. He views the world as an engineer, examining how things work. I’m a historian, deep into the liberal arts, and thrive on storytelling and the examination of why things happen, not so much how. So how do we make the irrational...

As some of you may know, for the past two years I’ve been working on my memoir. I work with a writing coach and last week she asked me to write about my office. Could it be that my office could tell me more about me than any of the memories of my past? I began working...

You may not expect a book from the 1800s to be the most riveting “beach read” during my vacation to the Caribbean over the holiday break. Neither did I. What I discovered while reading The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, a short sci-fi novel from 1897, is how...

Recently, I found a love note from the 1950s sent to me by a boy named Ricky. The letter was written on a piece of fragile, lightweight and brittle piece of paper, a soft caramel brown, the blue lines of old cursive writing practice sheets handed out to us during the...

Welcome to the World’s Best Cheese Competition, where “wine is just a liquid” and cheese reigns supreme. I attended this delicious event about senses and smells in Wales earlier this month, where cheesemakers from all over the globe competed to win the title of...

Do you care about cairns? I do. Learn why in my upcoming newsletter about rocks. What are cairns, anyway? How did they come about, and why do they sometimes look like Sesame Street or Star Wars characters? And, I saw these characters with my guide in Peneda-Gerês...

Have you lost something and found yourself? Among the many things that I lost during my seven decades of living, so far, is a guitar. And an island. I reveal my experiences losing these things and navigating life afterwards in my latest Substack newsletter, out now:...

I started a not-so-secret society. Wanna join? My film-making partner and I learned about a group of 18th century scientists who would travel by the light of the full moon near Birmingham, England to discuss their inventions, questions, and curiosities. They called...

The sharp crack of a trio of muskets pierced the air one fine July morning in Thomaston, Maine. I watched a small group of Revolutionary War reenactors as they approached, packing gunpowder into the muzzles, signaling that something of consequence was about to occur....