Once, on a river-rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, I traveled with a charming, good-humored man who happened to run an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He liked…

Read more

A dozen of us sat and stood around the campfire, guests at a lodge in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. My wife and I were there to hike and sleep and celebrate…

Read more

The present is by common definition the instant between the not yet and the already, a moment as narrow and treacherous as a tightrope. But you might instead define it…

Read more

As a teenager in the Mormon Church, I was led to believe I might live to see the world end — the fallen world of sin and imperfection, that is, which…

Read more

One morning, as I walked on the quiet, mostly wooded King Mountain trail above San Francisco Bay, a dog not much smaller than I and possessed of much sharper teeth…

Read more

I started hearing it about two years ago, and then I seemed to hear it constantly: people in their late teens and early twenties complaining, quite sincerely, that they felt…

Read more

In 1979, a catchy Kenny Rogers song called “Coward of the County” made it to the top of the country charts. It’s about a man named Tommy, whose father, a…

Read more

I have a theory — not a very good one — that the reason Google is so hot to develop self-driving cars is that time behind the wheel is the…

Read more

Think of our democracy as a house we built in 1776, big enough only for Christian, property-owning white men. Over the next two centuries, various groups struggled to make it…

Read more

So, it happened. Mythmaking beat math. Drama put data in its place. A candidate who styled himself a renegade outsider has become the forty-fifth president. It’s almost as though a…

Read more

For years, whenever I was in New Orleans, I used to run past an equestrian statue just outside the voluptuously green City Park. Though it is situated at a major…

Read more

A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and…

Read more

Only as a story will this make sense. One morning in August, craving company, I walked around the corner from my apartment in Livingston, Montana, and sat down at the…

Read more

In early 2015, fire ravaged a three-story building at the corner of 22nd and Mission in San Francisco. The blaze killed Mauricio Orellana, an immigrant from El Salvador, and destroyed…

Read more

Driving into Cleveland on a warm July Saturday to secure my press credentials for the Republican National Convention, I get a text from a friend in California, a guy in…

Read more

The radical is so often imagined as the marginal that sometimes the truly subversive escapes detection just by showing up in a tuxedo instead of a T-shirt or a ski…

Read more

No social encounter delights me more than meeting a doctor at a cocktail party. In clinical settings, doctors tend to be guarded and aloof. Catch one with a whiskey in…

Read more

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that…

Read more

I like to think I’m unique. Don’t you? Complicated. Surprising. Unpredictable. I like to think that people who’ve only just met me or who know only the basic facts about…

Read more

On April 24, 1916 — Easter Monday — Irish republicans in Dublin and a handful of other places staged an armed rebellion against British occupation. At the time, the British…

Read more

Like campaigning politicians, pornographers — who are also in the business of galvanizing tired nervous systems — face one problem that never goes away: cutting through the numbness caused by…

Read more

There are two things I think about nearly every time I row out into San Francisco Bay. One is a passage from Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain, in which he…

Read more

They look like a segment of Borges’s Library of Babel: twenty-four volumes almost uniform in bulk (a thousand pages each, give or take a few), identically bound in a reddish-brown…

Read more

I have come to perceive a cosmos filled with superintelligent beings — a virtually infinite number of them, whose minds have transcended their earthbound bodies and are independent of any…

Read more

Can the earth be saved by bureaucrats in long meetings, reciting jargon and acronyms while surrounded by leaning towers of documents? That is what’s supposed to happen in France this…

Read more

I have recently developed a crank theory, for which I can adduce no real evidence, that the human sense of time has its origins in story, or is at least…

Read more

I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. During the question-and-answer period that followed it, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of people was…

Read more

It may have been that I neglected to register with the Selective Service System when I turned eighteen, in 1960, as the law required. Or maybe my student deferment, available…

Read more