You earn a series of promotions at work, but when it comes time to make a lateral move, you find you’ve neglected to build a professional network that will help you make the next jump. You compartmentalize your success in badminton and realize too late you’ve neglected all your friendships and nobody is there to celebrate your wins when you retire from sport. You are so determined in your plan to succeed that you refuse emerging opportunities to succeed in a different way altogether. These are just some of the many ways to fail at a long-term game even as you succeed in the short-term o ..read more

I wrote this post a few years ago after being off the grid for a week and coming back to a bunch of messages about an emergency. I’m about to head out again, and I do always have that worry–what if something happens when I’m gone, and I’m not here to help? But reading this post again, I saw something different: it’s not that I wasn’t here to help, but that I have so many people at home who will. * When I turned on my phone over the weekend after a blissful week without cell service, I got an increasingly alarming series of messages from friends at home. A fire broke out near where I’m dogsitt ..read more

Over the last few months, I’ve grown convinced that the single most effective tool for the conversion of new birders is the board game Wingspan. This winter some friends and I became obsessed with Elizabeth Hargrave’s invention, a gorgeously designed and illustrated engine-building game that basically requires its players to assemble an aviary of western tanagers and yellow-rumped warblers and belted kingfishers, et al. Aside from its aesthetic loveliness, Wingspan’s appeal is that it turns even common birds into something like superheroes, replete with their own unique powers, weaknesses, and ..read more

Since I wrote this, October 11, 2017, I’ve had time to thoroughly understand that yes, I’m definitely grandmother age; and yes, I’m used to it; and what I’m used to is the idea that while I’m increasingly someone who needs to be protected, I’m also increasingly a protector. Not that I go around protecting things — I pick up farmers’ market stuff for neighbors, that kind of thing, nothing energetic — only that I feel strongly about protecting things. STRONGLY. Like, I need to get between people and whatever might hurt them. Like, I need to tell people what I see in them, that they’re full of c ..read more

Here’s a time capsule. I wrote this in 2011, before flying – along with everything else – felt like it was getting more dangerous. One thing I definitely don’t think we will ever experience again is the joy of flying on a mostly empty plane. It’s not every day that a flight is delayed because there are too few people on board. But, blame Will and Kate, Brits just weren’t flying out of London last Friday. As a result, the Virgin Atlantic A340-600 called Ladybird was carrying only 112 of her usual 380 passengers. So before we could take off, we had to play a little game of musical chairs. This w ..read more

God, I love dogs. That’s why recently I started volunteering at a facility where dogs from the very worst conditions around the world are brought for rehab and prep for adoption. It’s run by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), and it’s in a warehouse at a Maryland address not widely known, as it’s not for public consumption. That’s for good reason: These are often the roughest of the rough, animals at death’s door, dogs that have been hoarded, chained up and abandoned, forced to fight, or nabbed and caged to be sold at meat markets. If they get rescued and shipped from wherever to ..read more

I first met Our Jenny in 2010 (I think?), when I walked into her office at National Geographic to buy a lizard. It’s a cute story; we’ll tell it some other time. For now, all you need to know is that the reptile sale turned into a friendship, and then a collaboration, as I helped Jenny with research for some of the books in her bestselling Unlikely Friendships series. Her latest book, Dog Smart: Life-Changing Lessons in Canine Intelligence, is out this month, and I can’t wait for you to hear about it. KH: So, the Unlikely Friendships books were structured around anecdotes and photographs, but ..read more

This is a picture of my mother sheltering from an Arctic wind from when this post first published in 2015. She’s nearing 80 now and I just connected with her last night in southern Utah where she’s joining me for a week on the San Juan River. She teeters more than she used to, not as fast on the scramble wearing a pack, and I’m glad to be going back out with her into the wild. With Mother’s Day coming up, I want to honor her tenacity and her hunger for raw experiences. I held her cold hands in mine, rubbing warmth into them as she crouched behind a rock stack. A wet, July wind was blowing in ..read more

Irradiate maize, and it will begin frantically shuffling its chromosomes. Starve E.coli and it will accelerate its mutation rate. Many organisms have this response to stress. They throw the wildest possibilities at the wall to see what might stick, which is to say, what strange version of themselves might survive. They create disorder that might restore order. From a chaotic disk of gas, a planet forms and migrates into a stable orbit. Twin moons are brought into resonance. For every turn Enceladus takes around Saturn, Dione takes two. Tidal interactions with the planet keep this ratio steady ..read more

This post first ran in April 2019. As I get ready to go on maternity leave, I’m struck by how many things, large and small, had to go right for the tentative desires I felt five years ago — for a garden, and maybe even a family — to materialize. It’s been a messy and chaotic period, full of setbacks and delays, wildfires and plagues. But on this day in early May of 2024, I can see rows of lettuce and kale and snapdragons and native wildflowers out my kitchen window, and even a Cecile Bruner climbing rose, as yet uneaten by the deer or aphids. And yes, summer is coming, and with it, a baby. Bu ..read more