How many beetles does it take to make the sky go dark? — Ileft Alaska when I was nine years old. My father, brothers and I piled our belongings into a rickety old U-Haul and drove south, through Canada, to California. In retrospect, calling the U-Haul rickety was a charity. The paint was an ugly, burnt umber, and the seat cover felt like…

What do we mean to a sequoia tree? — The Sierra Nevada Take Highway 99 south of Sacramento for three hours and you will find yourself driving along the outskirts of Visalia, CA. You don’t care about Visalia and I don’t either. And rightly so, too; it is an unremarkable town and, with the exception of the 140,000 people who live there…

What else will we find as water levels plunge? — On Sunday afternoon, May 1st, 2022, a group of boaters spending the day on Lake Mead, east of Las Vegas, stumbled across a body stuffed into a barrel as they explored the lake. The locals noticed the barrel lying on the muddy lakeshore, except it quickly became apparent that something…

This newsletter will be changing format — Changing Format I have a backlog of forty stories sitting in my drafts folder on Medium. Many of them are only three or four words long with a title appended, serving only as a placeholder for an idea that I was once enchanted by. …

Self-affirmations are broken. How do we fix them? — Disclaimer: Not all PhDs are the same. I am a researcher, not a clinician; I lack the training and experience working with clients that a trained clinical psychologist or counselor has. That fact should change how you read this article. The right way to interpret this is as an exploration…

We’ve made the bears stronger — We often hear about wildfires, rising sea levels, and record-breaking temperatures occurring across the globe. These things make headlines because people like to chatter about the apocalypse. This isn’t a criticism; it’s certainly much better than staying silent. But in my recent research on climate change I’ve found that if…

Some thoughts on passion as a work philosophy — For my money, one of the worst pieces of advice that you can give a person is to follow their passion. I know that must appear hypocritical, given that my time on Medium is largely a passion-project, but bear with me for a moment and my reasoning will become clear. …

The other half of the writer’s dream — Off to a poor start I wrote my first article for Medium at the end of 2019, right before the start of the pandemic. The article was a thoughtful piece on how I had used mindfulness to cope with a recent chest cold. Given the timing and my symptoms it is almost certain that I…

Dusty archives, dreams, and going your own way — I haven’t talked a great deal about my past, here on Medium. For the most part, when I do talk about it, it is usually because the piece is personal and the past is relevant to the topic I am talking about. Even then, most of what I share is…