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 […]
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 […]
Amanda Giracca 