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This is the archive page for my blog. I am now putting my writing here, and I have a newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

How to Extract Honey

Another word for “extracted,” in this case at least, is “stole” — we didn’t make the honey, and the bees from whom we took it weren’t thrilled to lose it. It wasn’t a victimless crime. A lot of bees went down with the ship. For those of us who hopelessly anthropomorphize anything that makes decisions, insects included, it was a brutal affair — albeit sweet.

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How to Look

I’m writing now mostly in response to Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing.The chapter I am reading is about practices with attention. She wrote more eloquently some of what I am writing here, in better words. She used art historians and abstract paintings to inform her writing. I am using a seagull and a lifeguard and a zoo. And I am remembering, and wanting to put in writing, something I learned in a class taught by Chris Ware.

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Why to Save the Plovers

There is a plover controversy in Chicago. The plovers are a small thing, but they are so purely good, and it should be so easy for us to take care of them. If we do, that will say something about humanity that is so rarely said: we can make kind and gentle choices, and maybe, in fact, we are wired to.

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How to Not Buy Another Notebook

“Those old notebooks (plural because, I guess if we’re being honest, there’s also the dream journal I haven’t really done much with; and then that nature / prose book I was going to do little watercolors in) represented a past self. A WORSE self.”

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