Dayne, my mother’s ex-boyfriend, spent his childhood in Tennessee, where he got his southern drawl and where his father, who drank, would stomp through the house and sweep his long arm across the crowded kitchen counter smashing greasy dishes onto the linoleum. It was a habit that followed their family on the move to Sauk…

I was in my fourth meeting of the day when I got the news that Adam Yauch had died. Most guys my age knew Yauch as MCA, the throatier member of the Beastie Boys, with a coarser voice and smoother flow than the nasal machine-gun delivery of his band-mates Mike D and the Ad Rock.…

My daily bike-ride is not picturesque. It’s along a bike trail that’s squeezed between a highway and a tattered string of small factories and beaten down neighborhoods. The bike trail is usually fairly abandoned when I ride it. Occasionally I’ll pass another biker or someone walking. But I can always count on passing the man…

I / We. Mine / Ours. How wide the expanse between these terms. When my wife told me, a couple of days before my first appointment with the urologist, she would be accompanying me, I said no. I had my reasons. As I lay in bed, half-watching an episode of Seinfeld I had seen countless…

Continued from yesterday. Some folks like to use the word “harvest” instead of the word “kill.” But we harvest broccoli and tomatoes and cabbage from our garden. When I take the life of a whitetail that will be butchered and stored in my freezer to feed the family through the winter, I think the only…

At the cycle’s center, They tremble, they walk Under the tree, They fall, they are torn, They rise, they walk again. —James Dickey, “The Heaven of Animals” After the brief warmth of days barely above forty and lingering nights well below freezing, the snow that fell last week has become hard and brittle. Crystal upon…

I like movies because other people do the talking and they don’t expect you to say anything clever in reply. Also, something usually happens. I’m suspicious of mass culture, but I’ll say this for the masses—they mostly won’t tolerate two hours of some whiner going on about how exquisitely the world has wounded him. They…

Years from now, cultural historians, authors, and publishers will look back on the calendar year 2011-2012 as the year that attitudes toward the blurry line between fact and fiction changed. In early 2011 John D’Agata’s About a Mountain was published to much acclaim and hand-wringing. Those of you who followed the controversy over D’Agata’s admitted…

“We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that…