Carolyn Wells

“Each time I lose a pound My fat heart goes round and round All I want is to be thin See my bones instead of skin Each night I ask the stars up in vain Why must I be a fat kid at Camp Shane?”

“Within a matter of hours, Hunter and Freeman realized they had a hoard on their hands— something intentionally hidden, either in the hopes of returning for it later or as part of a ritual or ceremony. The last time anything like it had been found in the area was in 1864. To Hunter, the real […]

“In a consumer culture, minimalism was always a somewhat fancyland ruse. It was domestic anorexia sold as health; materialism repackaged as its opposite; perfectionism hawked as peace. It was the perversion of labelling a home curated down to zero the ultimate luxury or, worse, virtue.”

“Allen, during his interviews, had found an undercurrent of tension among Larrimah’s remaining 12 residents, one that stemmed from years of escalating feuds both small and large, unusual even for a tiny town where everyone knows each other’s business.”

“The Pacheedaht Nation has close to 300 members. About 120 live in the Pacheedaht community, less than a 15-minute drive from the blockades. And the inconvenient truth for the protesters, however well-intentioned in their inventive and prolonged efforts to save old-growth, however well-versed in the parlance of acknowledging the territories of Indigenous peoples, is that […]

“The hours are long in a monkish existence. Monks live at work, eat at work, sleep at work, wash at work, weekend at work and holiday at work. No wonder they had a somewhat tense relationship with their boss-on-high, as well as with each other.”

“We saw the city full of these strange armed men. With strange clothing and hair styles. We are back in the nineties, you can’t believe these people are back.” The last time the Taliban had seized power, in 1996, their reign had begun with relative calm, but they quickly started conducting house raids, making arrests, […]

“On a crackly phone call in March, I ask Church about the ethical quandaries of bringing animals back from extinction. Why bring back a cloned animal, rather than save a species that still exists?”

“Miss Georgia Peach had the first taste of the “World’s Largest Peach Cobbler” — 75 gallons of peaches, 70 pounds of butter, 150 pounds of sugar, 150 pounds of flour, 32 gallons of milk  — baked in a brick oven lined with school bus floor panels next to the county courthouse during Fort Valley’s annual […]