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English is a treasure trove of words, each with a precise meaning. It is also a source of confusion and frustration, since so many of those words have subtle connotations and refuse to stand still.

Is it possible to understand the persistent lag in vaccination rates as a function of failed metaphor? That is to say, as a failure of language—the language of data, the language of science, the language of political rhetoric (to name just...

English is a treasure trove of words, each with a precise meaning. It is also a source of confusion and frustration, since so many of those words have subtle connotations and refuse to stand still.

Most of us are living in a landscape designed for the car. “These days, so much of urban planning is undoing the mistake of the recent past.”

Great Plains. One man grabs a calf’s hind leg and lifts. Another seizes a front leg and heaves, flipping as easily as possible the two-hundred-pound animal. Then each man pulls hard to keep it still.

Where sunlight dims, lies a vast and largely unexplored region known as the ocean twilight zone. It’s also almost entirely unregulated.

Heard ravens this morning.

This past February, I hired a cab for a pandemic-fatigued trip with a friend to the Himalayan hills in Himachal Pradesh, down the Old Manali road. It was a drowsy afternoon, the summer heat landing thick on the windows. My friend and I...

I grew up in a leafy first-ring suburb of a segregated Rust Belt city. My childhood lay on the sunny side of the Clinton years, my parents taking full advantage of immigration policies that favored highly skilled foreign workers.