In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads.
At the far end, a shop called the Boscombe Antique Market had a big sign in the window that said ‘We Buy Anything!’, which seemed an unusually generous offer, so I went inside, gobbed on the counter a...
At one time he [Cornelius Vanderbilt] personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.
…a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terra-cotta flowerpot in which had been baked a little loaf of bread.What's this? I asked.It's bread, she replied.But it's in a...
His facetious grace in writing, and much else.
For you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has...
Aposiopesis.
Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the world’s total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel. Unfortunately,...
The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.
Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water),
New Zealand, meanwhile, is part of the immense Indian Ocean plate even though it is nowhere near the Indian Ocean.
My first rule of consumerism is never buy anything you can’t make your children carry.
Mispronouncing buoy. The thing that floats in a navigation channel is not a boo-ee. It’s a boy. Think about it. Would you call something that floats boo-ee-ant? Also, in a similar vein, pronouncing Br...
Life in Australia would go on, and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be.
It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astoundi...
Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don't end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can't go back to Somalia becaus...
Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there's nothing to worry about, and the other half telli...
All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the chok...
The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed...