How to use this Page

To write is to breathe. I don't think about it. It's like oxygen. But if you take it away from me, I will suffocate. I need the blank page as the landscape upon which I stand, to think, ponder, consider, rant, rave, reveal, question, and explore where I have been, what I have done, and [...]

Why is the government teaching us to waste water? I'm asking you because I'm talking about your garden. The fact is, the gardening practices that are endorsed and taught by the U.S. government and the Department of Agriculture make extremely inefficient use of water. How can this be possible when, as of February 1, 2013, [...]

It was in the middle of a gray and brittle February when I approached the wrought-iron gates of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I was already elbow-deep and several months into researching my book, A Grand Complication. I had read letters, diaries, and books, as well as countless newspaper clippings, yellowed documents, telegrams, and even hotel [...]

Like stratosphere, troposphere, and mesosphere, atmospheric regions with which it shares part of its name, the biosphere is a shell-shaped zone enveloping our planet. But where the others are made of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and trace gases, the biosphere is made of life. It extends in two directions — up and down — farther [...]

Recently I was invited to give a reading at Colgate University, where I wrote my first novel, Y, while on a one-year teaching fellowship. A handful of my former students accompanied me to lunch the next day, and at some point we fell into a discussion about why the protagonist of my novel, Shannon, was [...]

What do you write? I used to say book-length essays, but the inevitable follow-up question — essays about what? — would take me to another dodge, first-person narrative nonfiction... and seconds later I'd admit, I write about myself. Now I just say the word: memoir. I'm 38 years old and I'm working on my third [...]

The story of the Dakota War of 1862 — a six-week clash between Dakota warriors and white soldiers on the Northwestern frontier that left hundreds of settlers dead and culminated in the execution of 38 Native Americans on the day after Christmas, the largest mass execution in United States history — is grim. Its troubling [...]

When you write a children's book called A Rule Is to Break: A Child's Guide to Anarchy, some eyebrows inevitably get raised in your direction. As a result, people might not come to you for parenting advice, but we say they're wrong about that. For parents fearful of children run amok, our book sets off [...]

A hooligan is a hoodlum, a troublemaker. Someone a bit uncouth. But a hooligan is also a fish — the eulachon, a type of smelt endemic to the eastern Pacific Ocean. Eulachon are more commonly called candlefish, so named because of their high oil content, high enough that if you insert a wick into one, [...]

When I am suffering from writer's block, I usually try to solve the problem by going for a long walk.When I am suffering from writer's block, I usually try to solve the problem by going for a long walk. My habitual route takes me through an area of parkland in the center of my town, [...]

When I was 17, I fell in love for the first time. His name was Dylan. I had first noticed him when he performed the Elvis Costello song "Alison" in the Beaver Country Day School Talent Show. His voice was thin and cracked in places during the song, but something about him up on stage [...]

I feel as though, in a certain sense, I've spent the last two years in Antarctica with Douglas Mawson while researching and writing Alone on the Ice, my book about Australia's greatest explorer. Exactly one century ago, in January 1913, Mawson pulled off the feat that Sir Edmund Hillary later called "the greatest survival story [...]

I have recently been living in Texas. You'd need to be like me, an apprehensive Englishman, to share or even understand the uneasy thrill I have felt when walking in its countryside (though countryside is not a fitting word; it's far too tame for Texas — its wilds, perhaps, or its terrain). A country hike [...]

My novel The House Girl tells the story of two women: Lina Sparrow, a lawyer in modern-day New York, and Josephine Bell, a slave in 1850s Virginia. People often ask me why I chose to write about Josephine and who inspired her character. (They assume, I suspect, that Lina is a stand-in for myself: I [...]

Writing Apocalyptic Planet, I traveled to some of the most severe landscapes on earth. I relied on these places to tell the story of dramatic changes, revealing what this world is capable of. The first chapter was a multiweek foot trek across a sand-dune sea in Sonora, Mexico, in the heart of a seven-year drought. [...]

One of the most prized, and most difficult, tasks a new author undertakes is the quest to find his own voice. It is a desire to be unique and original, to sound like no one else. Because voice has to do with sound, right? Voice is the sound we make out loud. But then, what [...]

I am of the school that likes to read while eating. (Is that even a "school"? And of what — reading?) No, needs to read while eating. I know this is both very bad manners and apparently bad for the waistline, too: I have read that the dieter should eat without distraction, so as to [...]

The question of how an ancient institution survived into the modern era, with all its absurdities and anachronisms but also with enduring appeals to service, continuity, and curiosity about the inside of palaces, makes for an intriguing historical problem. Having written about the history of the British monarchy in varieties of nonfiction, I wanted to [...]

1. This is a piece about interruptions. And about how they— 2. Let's try again. One morning, brushing my teeth after breakfast, I got an idea for a story called "The News from Spain." I could see it whole — the shape of it, its trajectory, its voice. No details yet, but the entire thing [...]

The motto "Art and War," under imposing statues of Minerva and Mars, has graced a cartouche over the entrance to Stockholm's Riddarhuset — the House of Nobles — since 1647. Those words struck a powerful chord while doing research for my novel, The Stockholm Octavo. Providing a factual core for the story was Gustav III, [...]

The first half-dozen essays I wrote for my book on the human voice followed what friends might see as predictably tomboyish interests: war cries, football sportscasters, Marlon Brando. I enjoyed the explosive tone the collection was taking; I was conducting interviews with Elvis impersonators and Screamo singers and politicians who frequently used the word "assclown." [...]

I think almost every magazine writer has a little bit of book envy. I get plenty of satisfaction out of my job — I work at New York magazine, where I write and edit stories about culture and urban affairs — and I don't feel unfulfilled by it. (Although around hour 11 of a 12-hour [...]

When we were growing up, my brother and I devoured all kinds of science fiction. One moment we were waiting at the comic book store for the new pulp installment of the "slow glass" series; the next we spent trying to break down the radioactive process behind a B movie that allowed giant ants to [...]

When I was 12 years old, Aunt Sophie gave me my first book on architecture: Sir Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. I think Aunt Sophie liked it because it was elegant and English. I liked it because it had 3,500 drawings. Originally published in 1896, running to 20 editions (Aunt [...]

When I sold my memoir two years ago, I immediately looked up a man I hadn't spoken to in 15 years. He wasn't hard to find. He'd become a writer too. "Hi," I wrote to him in an email, "I just sold my first book — a memoir — and you appear in the opening [...]