An archiving expert and a dramaturg on the radical act of preserving your bits and bobs, why context matters, and the magic ...

AS THE WEATHER GETS WARMER each year, something unavoidable happens: the insects come back out. While some find the bugs ...

TO BUILD LASTING FURNITURE requires that I tap into this connection to the animal. It would be easy to imagine the body as a machine. The motions of building are repetitive—pulling a handsaw through ...

Maybe we need a different metaphor than “mother tree.” I say this as a mycophile who doesn’t want any of the organisms involved to be given short shrift. I say this because, as a species, we have ...

MY CONVERSATION WITH ARTURO would happen after I returned home, but on the last weekend of my Oregon trip, I buckled into Joe’s gray Toyota Tacoma truck as he drove us out to Mount Pisgah Arboretum.

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN eating mushrooms for at least twelve thousand years, according to the fungal micro-remains found in Paleolithic dental samples in a mountain cave in Eastern Spain. Yet the idea of ...

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 ...

THE FACT THAT I have never been a skilled singer has never kept me from karaoke. In adolescence, I was a part-time theater kid, a past that left me with a simmering, unquenched desire for some kind of ...

DAY AND NIGHT, NEW SMOKE is born. The weather has turned warmer, and the lack of rainfall prepares dried-out grasses and shrubs for fire. The burning begins in a few spots—unseen in the mountains—and ...

JO: I sometimes feel that in an individualistic culture, people get freaked out by the idea of being tied down or responsible for anything. Thinking about a gift economy, they might say, “I want the ...

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 ...