A few years ago, I traveled to Skovsbostrand on the island of Funen in my native Denmark to write in a solitary residence by the sea. It was winter, too cold to sit in the garden among the priestly Eranthis and flocks of snowdrops, their...
The third time I go to meet the devil, I pay better attention to the legend and visit on Halloween. The day is either cliché or the deep human instinct that there are times in the year when it is wise to fear.
The email was innocuous enough. A woman wrote to me explaining how her partner had been talking about my work and how much he’d enjoyed it—in particular, he’d remembered me giving a TEDx talk about ghosts and hauntings. He’d tried to show...
Miyu studies the miniature refrigerator, which is small enough to fit in the palm of her hand; the calendar on the wall with its pages frozen in thought; a round clock the size of a thumbnail with its arms stilled at 1:25. Miniatures like...
Somewhere on the internet you can find a photograph of Meshell Ndegeocello sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “Meshell Ndegeocello is a band.” The doubled meaning is perhaps obvious enough: She is herself a musical outfit and...
Periodical cicadas do not rely on camouflage to survive. They overwhelm their predators with numbers, billions of them crawling out of dime-size holes in the ground, an evolutionary strategy known among biologists as “predator satiation.”
In the eerie, quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s 2021, halfway through a Fulbright to Hungary, I went to a medical clinic in Budapest to have a lump in my breast examined. I wasn’t too worried. I was young, it was probably a cyst...
Over the course of thirty-six hours, my daughter and I rode with Mr. Toad into the depths of hell, squinted at a bonfire of sewing spindles, choked on hairspray, broke the fourth wall at least fifteen times, smiled at a thousand strangers...
My dream of being a professional writer, which I’d been pursuing in earnest since I was a teenager, had objectively come true. This wasn’t misery, not really. This was happiness, hiding. Nevertheless, the nagging dissatisfaction I felt made...
By my late twenties, it had gotten so bad I could barely sleep. Many people toss and turn after, say, a baked brie or Blazin’ Buffalo Wings. But at twenty-eight, even less-quarrelsome foods—steak, carrots, celery, pork chops, hummus, jicama...
