When I first heard of T.S. Poetry Press, I assumed that the T.S. was drawn from Eliot fame. But a visit to their website corrected my impression. Behind the Press’s founding was a game started by some inventive poets called “tweetspeak.” It’s a “Twitter poetry party,” a one-hour bash where everyone tweets a 140-character poem…

“As a back-of-the-envelope calculation within an order-of-magnitude accuracy,” Skeptic magazine founder Michael Shermer writes in his new book, The Believing Brain, “we can safely say that over the past ten thousand years of history humans have created about ten thousand different religions and about one thousand gods.” Humans have evolved, it seems, a tendency to…

Music might be the thing that in the end helps me keep my faith. I haven’t admitted this to my wife or kids, because I’ve made it abundantly clear that I don’t like the TV show Glee. I really don’t like it; most of the time it annoys the hell out of me. However, we…

One time, I read a comment made by a famous writer about how she indulged in a ritual whenever she straightened up her closet, cleaned out her refrigerator, and the like: “I can’t leave one shoe alone in the corner or one carrot in the drawer by itself; I wouldn’t want to hurt its feelings.”…

It’s the first thing most people have said. She was so young. Amy Winehouse was so young. I’ve had only a handful of conversations about Winehouse since her death—over dinner with movie group, at the hair salon—but they’ve followed a pattern. A brief bit about the cause of death—how could it not have been drug-related?—and…

My early adolescence feels like a movie I haven’t seen in a long time. When I first watched it, I thought it was profound, tragic—a saga for our generation. Memory has clouded the plot and left me with moods and snapshots: oceans of feeling, crippling insecurity, the thrill of footsie in Algebra and the sting…

As of August 18th, my husband and I will have been married twenty-one years, and have known each other for a total of twenty-four. It’s easy to believe after all of that time that I know everything there is to know about him. There’s something wonderful about that, the comfort and ease and shorthand that…

It’s been more than six weeks since my mother died, and the heavy cream-colored note cards are still sitting, reproachfully, in their pink box. The list of flower bouquets, delivered meals, and donations to my son’s Montessori school in my mother’s name—numbered 1-35 (and that’s just my portion: there are five other siblings), is scrawled…

“I was a wanderer who feels the solace of his native land under his feet again and moving in his blood.” —Wendell Berry, “The Country of Marriage” After a several year late-twenties lull, my last four summers have been dominated not just with weddings, but with the major weddings of family and intimate friends. I…

As I type this, the band-aid on my back is sliding off, the Vaseline from the dermatology office a slick, clear ooze spread below my shoulder blades. I had to get a mole removed, and the daily care the resulting wound requires is both minimal and difficult: I’m having a hard time reaching my arms…