I am following a van full of Prescott College students down a dusty road, descending from the plains of north-central Arizona toward the cliffs of the Verde River. Prescott College, affectionately known by its students as PC, is my alma mater. It’s been twelve years since I’ve been here, yet the land is immediately familiar, […]
The first thing I notice, as if there’s anything else remarkable about this scrubby swath of suburbia, is the glinting network of 9,000 solar panels, cordoned off by a chain-link fence: not the setting I had imagined when I thought of hunting, but then falconry is an adaptable sport. On a cold and clear Saturday […]
Excerpted from Vela Magazine: I had gone into science for the awe, but I eventually discovered that continuing on that path would mean that most of my life would be made up of statistics, entering numbers into databases, writing papers so dry that they didn’t feel like writing to me. Moments of awe would be […]
In the past several decades, the world’s meat consumption has risen, reaching a new peak in 2002 at 219 lbs (just over 99 kg) per person, Fitzgerald says. Slaughtering methods have become even more efficient and prices for meat have actually dropped, reaching the lowest in 50 years. The number of meat-processing facilities has decreased, […]
1. Last summer I repotted several cymbidium orchids. “Orchid” likely conjures up the loveliest of flowers, something too delicate to mess with, but the cymbidiums needed a firm hand. Over time they had migrated to the edge of their pots, as though trying to glacially ooze their way out and back to the wild. A […]
Over Memorial Day weekend, I enjoyed an idyllic three days with friends. When they left on Tuesday, I returned to the world and caught up on the news I’d been missing. I’d heard of the Isla Vista shooting, but it wasn’t until Tuesday where I finally learned of all the details. While I had been […]
Long before I met Ben, and before I had that echoey apartment, I lived in a one-room log cabin that sat by a little pond in the woods. I lived there for two years, alone. There was no running water, no electricity. There was a wood stove and propane lamps and a little gas refrigerator […]
One day during his senior year of high school in Wilmington, Delaware, Rich Pell stayed after school to watch a spider get “silked.” His school was near the headquarters of DuPont, the global chemical company with the motto, “The miracles of science,” and his biology teacher was friends with an employee. Scientists had identified the […]
Concerning Lyons, I will not say that I ever saw any my selfe, but some affirme that they have seene a Lyon at Cape Anne which is not above six leagues from Boston; some likewise being lost in woods, have heard such terrible roaring’s, as have made them much agast; which must eyther be Devills […]
The nosebleed was the first sign that I was probably out of my element. “Shit, honey, you have blood on your face,” Ben said. We’d only been hiking for twenty minutes and had already dropped our packs at a bridge to eat dry discs of bread that Ben had bought from a señora at a […]
Amanda Giracca 