I was probably eleven when my father started spinning plates. He’d been watching The Ed Sullivan Show and in between Petula Clark and Sergio Franchi, there was a man, all tuxed-up, spinning fifteen…

James Perkins had just killed his goats. Forty-seven in all. But for the two bulls, every one had been born right there on his property, and even though he was a rancher and they were stock, he lov…

A daily logic puzzle where you deduce who is a criminal!

Ashvin Harrison: Tree of Optimism I live in the aftermath of cancer, the green reforestation period after the great fire, the brown high-water line drying to dust on the siding after the hundred-ye…

During normal daylight hours, I work with and for other kinds of people. Specifically, I direct a statewide community engagement program that connects Oregonians—particularly those that have been e…

One by one, the hotel guests got the look. They’d come to Cherie’s concierge desk, eyes nearly crossed, listening to the voice in their head. And when they tried to pair with Cherie, an…

Sujit Das: A Boy on the Way Nick almost hit the boy. He’d been driving down Burns Avenue on his way to teach a class about a story in which a boy is hit by a car. His mind was empty, an unfamiliar …

A daily logic puzzle where you deduce who is a criminal!

Story art: Jesse Dittmar I got a letter from the government claiming an easement on my leg. I had just moved into this house and must not have looked at the paperwork carefully. A few months later,…

Uche Okeke, Owls, From the Oja Suite, 1962, ink on paper The first time I ever saw an owl was in the backyard of our childhood home in Enugu. That afternoon, my sister Ije stood by the guava tree f…

Because no tools can be carried on the plane, I buy them at the Home Depot near his apartment and sneak into my father’s building through the Service Only entrance. Dad’s Ford has more dents. One o…

THR illustration: a reference desk in a Michigan library, 1980s, AADL.org. How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google i…

Illustration of a table-turning séance from Félix Roubaud’s 1853 text, Les Danse des Tables Whenever Susan Bridge heard friends or family talk of inklings from the other side, or of being watched o…

Photo by Sam Chase, U.S. Geological Survey: “a huge dust plume rising like a gigantic mile-high wave over the southern San Joaquin Valley in December 1977.” You want me to tell you abou…

Back then, everybody smoked. I knew guys who could jump-start a Zippo lighter just by snapping their fingers. People smoked in restaurants, movie theaters, airplanes, trains, college classrooms, fu…

It was Chang-ma who corralled the women of the First Mandarin Baptist Church of Praise into their midweek meetings. “Mother of Prayers group (MOP),” she explained in her first e-mail summons, “will…

Lauren Strohacker: Coyote Anthropophony But it begins with moths. Dead ones specifically, as described in essays by Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard. Virginia’s was first, published in 1942, …

Their UK visas were all of five hours old when Sonya’s husband, Alexei, looked up from the computer and announced they would never escape Russia. “Come on,” she said. “Ticket prices can’t be that b…

There is a message on Voyager 1 and 2, space probes that have been sailing away from the planet Earth for almost 50 years. The message is cut into a 12-inch gold- plated copper disk and contains 11…

At first trying to be the mother that her daughter wanted made her cranky, but this was just because she’d forgotten how to make someone else’s desires her own. Soon she remembered the …

Illustration from Medieval Manuscript of Dante’s Inferno 17 It is said that until 1950 every Italian could recite by heart twenty-five lines of Dante, … Uh oh, she’s doing poetry again…. Yes,…

DaVinci: Fight between a dragon and a lion The coldest Christmas Eve on record and it was hands down my biggest order ever. I’d been driving for almost a year since The Daily Witness fired me. I us…

Serial miscarriers, especially those over forty, become accustomed to grieving in isolation. Two or three losses elicit sympathy and compassion. After the first, friends and therapists suggest that…

YouTube video by Yoram Bauman

Inevitably I’m asked, “Why devote a paper, much less an entire dissertation, to Plutowsky?” I have a two-part answer, the first of which is my personal connection to Plutowsky via his great niece, …

YouTube video by Joel Christensen

Picasso: ”Man Looking In a Mirror” (1969) You pick up the large, heavy volume that is Pushcart L: 2026 and flip through some of the first pieces, scanning to see what’s in store this year. You see …