By Dom Cioffi Günther Schabowski has died. While that news will undoubtedly leave most Americans wrestling with questions of why they should even care, for millions of people in Germany, he represents an epic paradigm shift in their history. East Germany (as you’ll […]
Category: Column
The Outside Story
The Outside Story: Migration takes guts
By Todd McLeish As an avid birdwatcher for more than 30 years, I’ve long been familiar with the big picture of songbird migration. Tiny blackpoll warblers, for instance, fly 1,500 miles from southern New England to the Caribbean in […]
Altitude Sickness
Skiing trumps running… always
This week, Halloween week, my birthday week, was a grand week. I am up to 13 days of skiing this year, and I hiked straight up Double Dipper and skied every day. My inning schedule went out the window, but […]
Column
Halloween type traditions
By Daris Howard While we were traveling through Peru, our university group spent many hours studying old churches, archeological digs, and ancient artifacts. But the thing I loved most was to see how common people lived, especially while traveling through […]
Generation Y
Techie chic
It was nearly three years ago that the journalist Farhad Manjoo published the seminal Slate article “This Is the Greatest Hoodie Ever Made: How American Giant created the best sweatshirt known to man”—still surely the most influential and frequently cited […]
The Outside Story
The Outside Story: Witch’s brooms
By Joe Rankin Harry Potter rode one during the Quidditch matches at Hogwarts. The Wicked Witch of the West zipped around on one in the Wizard of Oz. We’re talking, of course, about witch’s brooms. No one knows exactly why […]
Altitude Sickness
Amazing feats that had nothing to do with me
By Brady Crain The mountains looked inverted due to the refractive effects of an atmospheric thermocline. This happens when a layer of warm air slides over a layer of cold air. When I went up the chairlift I moved through […]
Looking Back
Halloweens from yesteryear
With Halloween right around the corner it’s fun to think about what that holiday was like back in the 50s and 60s–the time of my youth. “Back in the day” it was very unusual to see kids trick-or-treating any place […]
Generation Y
Hannah and “Lenny”
As an actual male fan of the writer/director/actress Lena Dunham, I subscribed to her new email newsletter—called “Lenny”—almost as soon as I heard about it. Dunham’s fame stems from having created the HBO program “Girls,” a critically acclaimed but only […]
The Movie Diary
The Iceman cometh
By Dom Cioffi This is the time of year when the outside temperatures begin to drop to uncomfortable levels, meaning extra care must be taken so life doesn’t get too distressing. Anytime the thermometer settles below the 32-degree mark, you […]