Someone stop T***p before he clear-cuts Alaska — The day our cruise ship docked in Ketchikan, Alaska, it was raining. We were well prepared, with full-body lightweight rain gear at the ready, so that we didn’t have to let the weather get in the way of our explorations. …

How our acceptance of one simple binary opposition is lethal. — “No pain, no gain.” “Mind over matter.” “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. Materialism. Carpe diem. Spiritualism. Metaphysics. Ars longa, vita brevis. Reincarnation. Psychosomatic illness. Willpower. Mens sana in corpore sano. Hysteria. “Women are emotional, men are rational.” For a very, very long time, humans have asserted…

The world is always an elaborate feast for a writer, but sometimes it helps to be ravenous enough to devour it. — Scene One: Pennsylvania in August I get off the Pennsylvania Turnpike as the GPS directs, and within five minutes, I’m driving among massive old trees, into the campus of Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center that’s open to anyone needing a place to stay. Make no mistake: outside Philly in August it’s every bit as…

On beautiful summer days in Juneau and Glacier Bay, there’s much to admire and food for thought. — On the one hand, it’s tempting to say, “better go see Alaska now, before the glaciers are all gone!” In fact, that’s exactly what my family recently did. All of us love to travel, crave the peace and sublimity of the natural world, and are fascinated by animals and plants…

We can and should talk about tourism’s negative impacts. But travel, by chance or design, can raise awareness, too. — I’ve been writing about my recent trip to Alaska in bits and pieces, as I’ve reflected on what I saw and experienced. So often, the significance of travel only becomes knowable after we’ve returned to daily life, with its regularity and predictability, its comforting array of known quantities. …

From now on, I don’t want to put myself in a box. — From the time I was a teenager, I liked taking personality tests. I was an avid reader of astrology, and not just the silly, generic newspaper variety: I read in-depth analyses of things like ascendants and houses and moon signs, trines and oppositions and retrogrades. I read about numerology and…

Finding an unexpected celebration in Talkeetna, Alaska. — I know: Talkeetna, Alaska, is still far south of the Arctic Circle. It technically doesn’t have “midnight sun.” What it has during the month of June is “civil twilight,” which means that the sun only dips six degrees below the horizon. To the uninitiated, meaning those of us who’ve spent…

It’s time the news media and all of us on Twitter used the power of the silent treatment to take back civic speech. — [ . . .] There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray A few months ago, I was reading and writing about the people throwing their hats into the ring…

The word “science” as used in popular media doesn’t always mean what we think it should. — It’s gotten to be so commonplace in headlines that a search for the terms “science says” and “according to science” yields more results than you can shake a stick at. But what do these phrases promise readers, and what do the articles they attract us to deliver? I’ve limited myself…