Articles

It was the mid-1990s. I was sitting across a white damask table-clothed table at a midtown Manhattan steak house watching my editor, Bob Loomis, alternately cut into a ribeye and…

One of the few things I appreciate about Facebook, besides tours of my friends’ faraway lives and photos of the babies being born to my former “Baby Js”, is the…

 If not for the astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan, University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass might be writing and teaching about Nor’easters, Mount Washington in New Hampshire and Boston’s…

For well over a decade, my memoir was a perennial backburner project. I would vow to carve out time to write each week, but work or life always took precedence.…

With something of a literary apology to Garrison Keillor … It was anything but a quiet week in Lake Woebegone, aka These dis-United States, as we headed into the nation’s 246th…

When I asked Saadia Khan whether or not she identifies as a journalist, she said no. Her definition of a journalist: “someone with a degree in journalism or has worked…

In the minority writing of last month’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, three justices delivered a dissent that was both lacerating rebuke and baleful elegy. Folded unexpectedy inside:…

Just when I think the dominant news of the day is too big to be pushed aside, it is eclipsed by other news. I was working through an early draft…

Great story ideas are everywhere, and Corinne Purtill spotted a gem on a family trip to the Los Angeles Zoo, where she learned the story of a celebrity with a…

Conclusion based on anecdotal evidence: Anyone who writes a regular column for a newspaper or magazine works harder than you know. Corollary: Community newspaper columnists, who usually can’t tap events…