This post will not be complete or even sufficient, but it’s what I have in me right now. Fifteen years ago I spent time on Guam and in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (which together form the Mariana Island archipelago) to help make a documentary about the indigenous communities there and the…
Last night I googled “how to go help rebuild Barbuda” and got not much besides the Prime Minister asking people to be tourists in Antigua, Robert DeNiro pouring money in so that he can build a resort, and an appalling opinion piece out of Jamaica (with lots of healthy comments) stating that Barbuda should take…
Dear Rebecca, Maybe you already know this: When I was in my late 20s and in graduate school at Stanford, you came to give a talk about the American West. I think it was right before you published River of Shadows, your book on Eadward Muybridge and the technological west. I approached you afterwards. I told…
Something shifted in me during or after the press conference yesterday, or during a stormy night, or when I cried in the bathroom this morning about the way Trump bullied that orthodox Jewish reporter, with whom I surely disagree on many issues but who deserves respect and dignity like us all, or on the way…
I am on an aisle seat in an airplane on my way to Philadelphia. My children are sitting next to me, doing word searches and homework. There are families and business people and elderly couples and people of all colors and ages around me. I wonder if any of them are headed to the Women’s…
Yesterday at a poetry workshop I took off two layers of clothes. One minute we were discussing black poetry. The next, we were arguing about women’s dresses at the Oscars. The next, I had taken off my clothes. You see, Maya Angelou told us in her powerful, incomparable way that no matter what you do…
Let’s make him fly, says Milo, about his foam board Santa hitched to tottering, prop-legged reindeer when we get out the Christmas decorations. And I believe him. I believe in him. I have to. Because more people were gunned down today. People who help people were gunned down today. So sweet five-year-old boy, I will…
On Monday evening, which happened to be the evening of my 43rd birthday, my husband came home with the mail and dropped it on the desk as usual. And it was the usual pile of bills and holiday catalogs and appeals for end-of-year donations. And the Princeton Alumni Weekly. For years, when this magazine…
Because I am finding my way through this fear of routine massacres in America. Because it is so mysterious to me to raise a son. Because I really have strong feelings about guns— here’s a poem: ON REMAINING NEUTRAL WHILE YOUR FIVE-YEAR-OLD HANDLES A GUN It takes practice. It must, to find just the…
My grandfather Robert was a large man, in many ways. He drank Coca-Cola, smoked too much, adored candy, ate liverwurst sandwiches with potato chips on top. He died of emphysema when I was in high school, before I got to the age when I could have straight-up conversations with him about the world. He was…