Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early...
One [project of Teddy Cruz's] is titled Living Rooms at the Border. it takes a piece of land with an unused church zoned for three units and carefully arrays on it twelve affordable housing units, a c...
Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more, says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. But to lose oneself in a city—...
Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the arch...
I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map…nights alone in motels in remote western towns wher...
Georgia O’Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, from the faraway nearby. It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emo...
Ci, których przeraża równość małżeńska, są, na co wskazuje wiele znaków, tak samo przerażeni wizją równości w parach heteroseksualnych jak równością par tej samej płci.
Building a museum case and filling it with types of mussels is one way of knowing mussels; but on the shore, a mussel leads to a crab or a curious stone, which leads to another thing and eventually le...
Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the...
What’s meant by reproductive rights, of course, is the right of women to control their own bodies. Didn’t I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?
What is the message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves- that...
What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether
Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to do...
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, wher...
Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure tha...
People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.
In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they’re more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be tol...
If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Som...
The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the er...