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As Thanksgiving approaches, I think back to the first Thanksgiving I spent with my infant daughter three years ago, which was also the last one I spent with my grandmother. The multigenerational gathering at my childhood home in Alhambra, mixing Chinese, Vietnamese, and American traditions, is not only etched in my memory; it’s immortalized in a digital photograph.
In the photo, my mom and I are …

It’s a funny thing, celebrating Thanksgiving outside of the United States. Just try explaining the whole deal about the Pilgrims and the Indians to the uninitiated. They might end up thinking you’re crazy–or worse, sadistic. And without the fall season, it just feels wrong to feast upon turkey, squash, and pumpkin pie. They’re heavy dishes that suit the cold weather, and they’re best served on …

The warning echoes beneath the girdered ceiling of Boston’s South Station, and in the cramped bustle of New York’s Penn Station, on a TSA loop of repeating announcements: “Keep personal items in close proximity.”
Any prerecorded phrase, repeated often enough, can drive one mad. But that last two-word phrase is especially wretched.
“Close proximity” irks me viscerally, like chewing tinfoil. We are bombarded with it daily, …

Do you have complicated feelings about Thanksgiving? Maybe your ancestors were among this continent’s indigenous peoples, and you have good reason to be rankled by thoughts of newly arrived English colonists feasting on Wamapanoag-procured venison, roasted wild turkey, and stores of indigenous corn. Or maybe Thanksgiving marks the beginning of a holiday season that brings with it the intricate emotional challenges of memory, home, and …

We have a love-hate relationship with mass-produced food. It is convenient, consistent, and inhospitable to the bacteria and mold that for most of human existence limited how long we could store and eat certain foods. But every few months, a revelation about the modern food we take for granted emerges to stoke our anxieties.
You may have heard at the end of August about Starbucks’ …

Wherever you go in the Philippines, the sea is never too far away.
I spent summers as a child laying on sunny beaches and playing in the waves. Sometimes we would go to an island where the white sand, framed by coconut trees, was uninterrupted save for the bleached driftwood filled with tiny crustaceans popping in and out of their burrows. Getting there required a …

The Pine Barrens of New Jersey may reverberate with the fetid screams of the cloven-hooved demon known as the Jersey Devil. The redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest may shake from the footfalls of the 9-foot, fur-covered primate known as Sasquatch, and America’s Southern swamps may teem with scaly, web-fingered lizard men. But my home state of Wisconsin is as well-known for sightings of things …

If a boy in the dark were to take three steps per second forward and if there were a coil of string approximately 100 yards in length rolled in the opposite direction. If there were a shadow moving at two steps per second towards a sound. Footfall or breath. If the string were red and spun from the soft wool of his mother’s lambs, the …

People all over the world are searching, like explorers, for a model to support the high-quality digital journalism our societies and democracies need.
We think we’ve found a model at sea. It looks like a reef.
Coral reefs are miracles of evolution. They are among the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. They exist in a nearly nutrient-free ocean and have no central control—and yet they are enormously …

Lost amid the deafening praise for Downtown Los Angeles’s reconstitution as modern urban renaissance is the deafening daily noise that accompanies Downtown LA’s reconstruction as modern urban renaissance.
Mayor Garcetti, make no mistake, this is a citizen’s cry for help. You may not know me, but you know of 50,000 of my like-minded denizens. And in a city where less than 10 percent of the …