It has taken 75 years to recover our numbers from the Shoah. That’s not enough for us to show up on the graph. In 2017, I learned of a new project in ecological awareness and visualizing environmental justice. It was aimed at assembling 100 people who are representative of the…

On Gifts from the Air and the Sea For months I have been collecting feathers off the ground in my yard. It started with just a few, and now a pencil jar on my desk is nearly full. They’re almost all gray, with white edges or warm brown spots sometimes…

On taking notes, keeping accounts, and friends who can catch you. Part I of II My friend Eric tells me why he can’t remember all we discussed last week: “I wrote the notes in my ‘one-day hand,’” he says. Eric’s one-day hand is “​​legible only in the loosest sense and…

The story that would shape our future — On January 29, 2000, my husband Gil Schamess died. He was 34. This short story, written by Gil in 1993 a few days before or after we met and fell in love, is as good an epitaph and testimony to our life together as any I can find. Reprinted here…

Richard McCann’s Gift of Teaching, and the Grace of Being Seen Somewhere in my things is a thin, brittle letter on the letterhead of the Jenny McKean Moore Fund. It’s from 1995, the twilight of the time when letters mostly came in the mail, written on paper, handed to you…

In April 1942, Dorothea Lange showed up on the doorstep of the Raphael Weill School in San Francisco to photograph the children, specifically the Japanese-American children, who were students there. Walking with a mincing step caused by the childhood polio that had shaped her right foot and weakened her right…