Employees of the Heart

August 4, 2009

I saw my heart beating today from behind its walls. In darkened chambers easily mistaken for underground rooms, a handful of workers labored without pause. The workers are valve gates, flanges of flesh regulating blood flow with relentless precision. It’s easy to see why one day they might quit from fatigue or boredom. [...]

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Death of Rational Thinking

July 31, 2009

“When do we start a serious dialogue about the Birther movement being a proxy for racism that is unacceptable to articulate in more direct terms?”
So asks Glen Thrush at Politico about a new poll on whether President Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen. The poll shows 58 percent of Republicans believe Obama [...]

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Why of War Fades

July 25, 2009

The last European survivor of World War I has died at age 111. Harry Patch’s late-life interviews are cautionary. Reading this story, I’m struck by a glaring hole: unmentioned is why nations sent millions to be slaughtered. A close friend of Patch said the veteran stressed two messages: “Remember with gratitude and respect those [...]

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Meaning of Life

July 16, 2009

I hope Roger Cohen of the New York Times wins a Pulitzer Prize for his remarkable commentary from the streets of Tehran. (He discusses the coverage here.) But world-stage politics aren’t his only topic. Yesterday’s gem, “The Meaning of Life,” uses a study of monkeys’ caloric intake to explore universal themes. And his image of [...]

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Tonsorial Tale

July 13, 2009

Over the years I’ve learned to let silence invite candor. So people sometimes tell me more than they should, or more than I want to hear. Today, the guy cutting my hair mentioned how fast my eyebrows grow. Then he volunteered that his eyebrows have always been too sparse. Except for two adjacent hairs [...]

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Attack of the Aphids

July 11, 2009

For two weeks the broccoli heads stood like princes of the garden, waiting for a kitchen coronation. The wait was too long.
Hordes of aphids stormed the cedar-plank box from which the broccoli grew and blanketed anything green. The heads looked cloaked in a lumpy white soot. Ruined.

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Might-Have-Been Fireworks

July 4, 2009

I would have stopped there if I had been a few decades younger and still reckless and easily thrilled by mega-fireworks. It was one of three stores on the Nez Perce Reservation in tiny Lapwai, Idaho, competing to sell the really good stuff for the Fourth of July. I passed it ten times during a [...]

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Blissful Ignorance

July 3, 2009

Seeing the world through the eyes of four year olds must be like looking through a peephole. This narrow, constrained view also bestows them with blissful ignorance. Take as evidence an exchange today involving our little boy and his friend:
NPR, soundtrack of our life, blares in the kitchen. Michael Jackson’s name is mentioned, again. The [...]

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Hidden House, Hidden Story

June 28, 2009

Rarely is anything as it appears. How’s that for an overused truism? But it’s one I keep learning again and again. Take the case of this abandoned house. During a seven-day research trip last week, it was first on a long list of places and people to see on the Nez Perce Reservation near Lewiston, [...]

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Obsession as Elixir

June 27, 2009

News that Farrah Fawcett died this week at age sixty-two conjured a memory. I was a young reporter in Thomasville, Georgia. It was 1975 or thereabouts. I wrote a story about a boy afflicted with a terminal disease, a boy whose only source of joy was his obsession with Charlie’s Angels.

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History Repeating

June 17, 2009

In 1978, when I was a young newspaper reporter in Melbourne, Florida, I covered a protest march by a few dozen Iranian students. Carrying placards and shouting slogans, faces flush with anger, they looked as if they had wandered onto the wrong movie set.
I didn’t know much about the target of their rage: the Shah [...]

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Revolution in Real Time

June 15, 2009

If you’re interested in following a revolution for freedom in real time, one in which people risk their lives to stop oppression, follow what’s happening in Iran via Andrew Sullivan’s blog. The response to the hijacked election is among the most moving news events I’ve encountered, largely because much of the coverage comes directly from [...]

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Dueling Gardens

June 9, 2009

I’m afflicted with vegetable garden envy. Sure, we have many things growing and gracing the dinner table. Way too much lettuce in fact. But our urban bounty has come to harvest slowly because no part of the yard has day-long sun. And there’s one raised bed in which everything seems frozen in time despite the [...]

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