Essays

“As long as a piece of string.” That was my English teacher’s answer when a student asked how long an essay had to be.

In 2005 I visited South Africa, and as part of the trip we took a jeep up the Sani Pass into Lesotho, the highest plain in sub-Saharan Africa. There I met a woman who lived in an isolated rondavel with her

Ostensibly, Mark Twain once said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. He had a good publicist. Being friends with a writer is a dicey proposition. Sooner or later, you’

So it turns out that I'm not the only one who learns things the hard way. Who knew? When I was attending college in Pittsburgh, an ex-boyfriend announced that he was flying to New Orleans to visit me over

We humans are pretty proud of our intelligence. We’ve built skyscrapers, landed on the moon, mapped the human genome, and carry more computing power in our pockets than NASA had during Apollo. And yet, sometimes we’re not so different from

I've been thinking about a number lately. 42. If you've read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you know it. A supercomputer called Deep Thought spends 7.5 million years calculating the Answer to the Ultimate