michelleweber

“I found out the secret was really not to make eye contact, because if I saw one of us start to tear up, it opened the floodgates for me.”

“There’s something childlike about it; instead of hiding under a blanket, we built our houses just so. In this telling, safety is a matter of painting the right sign, hiding the right shoe, or putting in a window.”

The fight over a proposal to harvest kelp on an industrial level off the Scottish coast is about the survival of rich ecosystems we don’t know enough about — and the survival of local identity.

Are mayors the heroes of 21st century politics, or is going from getting the snow shoveled and the sewer lines fixed to managing a global pandemic a leap too far?

As with violence and political upheaval, bread: “With obvious sorrow she would repeat, during our walk to the bread oven, how easily one grew accustomed to the taste of this bread over time.”

“Because I am fearful of messing up our relationship, I have placed our memories in a time capsule, trapped in limbo between past and present. How do I bridge the distance between us and say goodbye to my father while he’s still here?”

“She’s dead, and I’m quarantined. That’s how the story ends. I keep going back over it in loops, trying to find a way to sweeten it, but nothing changes the facts. I wasn’t there with her at the end. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I don’t even know where her body is right now, […]

“The anguish that has plagued the Murchison students presages the kind of long-tail trauma that many of today’s witnesses to shootings will be burdened with for the rest of their lives.”

Surprise: women’s empowerment harnessed to American-style capitalism delivers more inequality, and an Instagram wall can’t fix it.

Julia Child, MFK Fisher, Edna Lewis — behind the most influential food writers was one innovative, exacting editor.