Does the region still care about TriMet and ensuring a strong public transit system, asks public transit design and policy consultant Jarrett Walker. While leaders face many competing priorities, the ...

Whew. But it’s true that if we return to being fat we will be tired all the time. That’s just the facts of the case. My body knows it quite ...

Learning to live with my aging mind

PHerc. 1667, sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end — without ever being opened.

He was a force of Nature (and Uma Thurman's dad)

Now the mock orange sprawls in white blossom over the white fence collar, leaning at ease, unshaven: the June rain has not yet imposed its p...

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere.

I was seventeen, and blinded by youth: by my grandiosity and timidity. I wavered, as boys do nowadays, between thinking myself extraordinary...

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere.

So. Begin when all the rest had left behind them headlong death in battle or at sea… Yah, yah. Okay. We are going to be gentle with the gran...

The knotted candyflower and the bleeding hearts were supposed to like the shade: perversely they are flourishing now in the bright sun aroun...

YouTube video by Heidi Blais

YouTube video by Life, The Universe, and All the Rest

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere,.

Photo by Zennora Brna, 2025 What is a good good-bye, then—burningwhat we’d need in some afterlife on a pyreof shoebox dioramas we’d made when wewere little? Death hadn’t dealt me the skillsnor time…

אִם־בְּחֻקֹּתַי תֵּלֵכוּ…If you walk in My hukkim… (Lev. 26:3)Hukkim as in haqaq, carvedin stone. Carved in us. Engraved like a piece of silver,like the goblet from my weddingthat ten years after d…

Captain: And you could draw the analogy – I’m not saying you should, mind you, just that you could – that that’s what consciousness is, and ...

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere.

Alike for those who for To-day prepare, And those that after some To-morrow stare,      A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries "Fools! Y...

Sun: Righto. Let’s have a council then, and hear everyone. Lieutenant, you want to bring something up. Lieutenant: I guess we have all had s...

Erasmus, Robert Graves and Matthew Buckley Smith

[ I asked the persona variously known as the First Lieutenant and the Union Boss -- First Lieutenant, because he thinks of himself as the pe...

So. I guess I would say that where Abrahamic religion strikes me as uniquely valuable Is that it conceives of the person and the religious p...

Of all the vernacular verse forms popular in the early Renaissance, the sonnet was the one that had the most spectacular literary success, breaking out from its Italian origins into Spanish, French, P...

If you want to be a poet in a declining literary culture, that is.

Dear Prudence, sings a man who left before me won’t you come out to play? Fitting Lego bits together, left in a cryptic lay by a little girl...

I enjoy Europe as much as the next urbanist, but years of living and traveling there never uprooted one of my most unpopular opinions:  Streets numbered in sequential order are a wonderful thing for t...

I arrived at Tom’s to find the lot empty, the windows dark, the door locked, and a scrawled note: “restaurant closed until further notice. s...

already spring is the little death of fall: the wind brushes the tulip tree with the back of its hand and a clutch of petals falls, falls,  ...