

To Truly See... Look Away
I recently spent two weeks in Grand Teton National Park on a writing retreat. I’d been there before, but this time I adopted a...


Homemaking
Last month, I served as the artist-in-residence at Homestead National Monument outside of Beatrice, Nebraska. Having come to believe...


Science, Art and Human Universals
We (eight Americans and seven Moroccans, along with a French documentarian and a Japanese funder) pulled off a performance of Locust: The...


When Little Gnomes Have Big Ideas
I like gnomes. The legendary, subterranean dwarfs are fine, but I mean the other sense of “gnome”—a pithy statement of general truth...


The Locusts are Coming (Operatically)!
I previously wrote about a collaborative project with Dr. Anne Guzzo—an acclaimed composer in the Department of Music—to produce a...


Scientists Say the Darnedest Things
Back in the 1960s, my family watched Art Linkletter’s television show, which included a segment in which he asked children questions or...


How Science OPERAtes
Few people grasp the complexities of science and still fewer engage the richness of opera—so why not combine the two?! This seems...


A Textbook Project (really, it’s not as dull as you imagine!)
One of the challenges of being a writer is having too many interesting projects and not enough time. This is hardly the grounds for pity....