This past weekend, during a tracking course in California (spoiler: I did not ace the final exam), we students were tasked with identifying the above gorgeous creature, found dead by our instructors on — where else? — the highway. This gorgeous little beast is a long-tailed weasel, Neogale frenata, a lithe, furtive carnivore that I’d never before...

Last month, scientists described two new species of killer whales, and the community of cetacean researchers and advocates online immediately erupted in the Internet equivalent of excited squeaks, squeals, and whistles. But I felt a little bereft, my sense of killer whales as cultural beings diminished. Killer whales – or orcas...

My father, Jim Fields, died unexpectedly in November at age 81, of a stroke. Last week I wrote a eulogy for his memorial service on Saturday. It was hard. I’m a writer, and goldarn it I wanted it to be the best eulogy ever written. (I’m confident that I did not achieve that, but it’s certainly the best eulogy I’ve ever written.) Here‘s a lightly...

If you could record your dreams, would you ever be able to stop watching?  That’s a central plot point in Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders’ three- to five-hour arthouse flop/work of staggering genius (depending on which cut you watch) from 1991. He threw cyberpunk, detective noir, and road movie into a blender with a civilisational...

Last night I took a crowded elevator to the hundredth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Not rattled or shaken, we were propelled to the top in less than a minute, like being beamed up. Doors opened and we all poured into a high-windowed space looking onto the electric-white boroughs of New York City. A revolving door turned us onto...