Or maybe a little ostrich-back jaunt this evening. 15 September 2025 Hello friends, Have you ever felt the need to take an expanded view of things? A humble example: consider life as an ostrich. Or something better, as an ostrich jockey. The largest and heaviest of all birds now walking the earth, ostriches also lay eggs that hold the record [...]

All the dunes you can jump off. Or on. 15 August 2025 Hello friends, Have you ever sledded down a huge dune? Or leapt off one into space and landed safely two stories lower? Great Sand Dunes National Park, in Colorado, is a giant-sized sandbox that’s safe to play in. The dunes are ginormous, and the sheer quantity of them [...]

The horses run anywhere they want 15 July 2025 If you’re captivated by horses, this turnaround might be fun: on Assateague Island, off the coasts of Maryland and Virginia, the humans are captives of the horses, who do whatever they want. The humans have rules to abide by. But really, the rules aren’t obnoxious. Nor are the horses. Camping on [...]

And who is smart enough to know? 15 May 2025 My favorite dictionary defines sentient this way: having feeling. And sapient this way: showing wisdom or the ability to reason. Sentient is often used to include the idea of sapient, which can cause confusion, as in this month’s free story. AI Assist compares the two words: “Sentience refers to the [...]

Civilized or not, they just seem to go together. 14 February 2025 Tarzan emerged from the prolific imagination of writer Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912, and his popularity carried him onward for years, through a series of 23 additional Tarzan books. But Tarzan didn’t get through too many books before Jane showed up to join him. In the stories Tarzan [...]

First of all, it has to be made from scratch. 15 January 2025 To grow a perfect snowflake you start with a cracking-cold windless day or night, although nights like this may be hard to find near you. You get a light shower of water vapor falling, from high up, in drops so tiny they’re probably invisible. You let the [...]

Was it the Ode to Freedom? 15 December 2024 With his ears and his general health failing, Beethoven is said to have composed much of his famous 9th Symphony on a piano with sawed-off legs, kneeling on the wooden floor with his ear near the boards so he could feel, as much as hear, the sounds he was fitting together. [...]

Some things are just funny. We know that. 15 November 2024 Hi friends, It’s probably fortunate that there are so many ways to make people laugh: slapstick and sarcasm, mimicry and absurdity. My personal favorite is absurdity. Here’s someone who makes me laugh, always: Wes Anderson, a Texas-born indie filmmaker who’s a master of funny, I’d say. He’s won piles [...]

And it’s often absolutely free. 15 October 2024 Here is a contribution to the world from Roger Scruton, British writer and philosopher: The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. But they had a remedy for this. And the name of that remedy was “beauty.” The beautiful work of art brings [...]

Inventing your own career 15 September 2024 I’ve been writing about someone who is an extraterrestrial fiddler, and what prompts him to adopt this profession during threatening times. It would be more accurate to say that he decides to invent his profession, because what he ends up doing is pretty unprecedented. Writing that story reminded me of Lindsey Stirling, who [...]