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welcome to my blog.

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American Plant, Bethesda, Maryland, February 25, 2017.

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dog riding dog

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Probably my favorite story I’ve written so far this year: The Beekeeper Who Craved a World Without Right Angles.

To rid his life of the right angle — which, to him, represented nonsense, confusion, and hate — Roy Brewster designed and built a house in 1952 that celebrated the six-sided figure. Modeled on the structure of honeycomb cells, it soon became known to many as The Beehive House. Nearly everything was hexagonal, from its floor plans to its windows to its shelves. A hexagonal quilt adorned the bed he shared with his wife, Nettie, and a copy of the Mona Lisa hung in the living room in a hexagonal frame, against hexagonal parquet wall panels. Outdoors, the garden’s paving stones led to an angular letterbox. The official name Brewster gave it was “The Norian House” — shorthand for “NoRIght ANgles.”

Read on here!

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Diableries, a series of humorous stereoviews produced in the 1860s in Paris that capture a vibrant underworld of devils, skeletons, and satyrs. Each was carefully hand-colored so the frozen figures came alive with glowing red eyes.

Read on!

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Reboot with the Ancient Japanese Calendar of 72 Microseasons

Forget summer and spring; bring on the season of "The Bear Retreats to its Den."

Many people measure their year in four seasons; others, just two. In ancient Japan, the total came to a whopping 72, with each lasting about five days, all together making up 24 larger divisions known as sekki. While this may sound confusing, these 72 microseasons are meant to express the passing of the calendar year as a soothing, poetic journey that draws your focus to the subtle shifts of the natural world.

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Chairs designed by George Hunzinger, circa late 19th century.

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Recreating the Face of a 9,500-Year-Old Man

A 9,500-year-old human skull at the British Museum may help visitors connect to our human ancestors.

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Te Kuiti, New Zealand, December 26, 2016.

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Rita Lundqvist, “Birds (Fåglar)” (2009)

Rita Lundqvist, “Fågelbad” (2010)

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Houston, Texas, December 16, 2016. 

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Houston, Texas, December 16, 2016.

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Jorge Castillo, "El circo" (1962)

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On Optimism and Despair

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.

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Musical Compositions Stitched from Lace Patterns

Harpist Zeena Parkins's project LACE translates the visuals of lace fragments and knitting charts into notation for instruments.

I had the pleasure of interviewing the incredible Zeena Parkins, who translated lace into music for harp and other instruments

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A Small Celebration of One of the Kiowa Six’s Most Prolific Painters

Four paintings by Stephen Mopope, discovered a few years ago at Brown University, are on view for the first time.

Happy to have come across the stunning work of Stephen Mopope thanks to a chance discovery by Brown University librarians.

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Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of FDR’s Japanese Concentration Camps

The military seized her photographs, quietly depositing them in the National Archives, where they remained mostly unseen and unpublished until 2006 Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother photograph from 1936 Dorothea Lange—well-known for her FSA photographs like Migrant Mother—was hired by the U.S. government to make a photographic record of the “evacuation” and “relocation” of Japanese-Americans in 1942. She was eager to take the commission, despite being opposed to the effort, as she believed “a true record of the evacuation would be valuable in the future.” The military commanders that reviewed her work realized that Lange’s contrary point of view was evident through her photographs, and seized them for the duration of World War II, even writing “Impounded” across some of the prints. The photos were quietly deposited into the National Archives, where they remained largely unseen until 2006.

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from a recent trip to the lovely Providence Athenaeum, founded in 1836 📚