Okay, so it’s very hard to tell that it’s Spring when the sun blasts the same as it does every other month of the year and the only things that might bloom are cacti and those are obscured by the many, many pieces of windblown trash or old mattresses or other urban flotsam. And “Break” …
Author Archives: Nathan
The Juárez Question, Answered
In my post last week about whether I should go to the murder-rich city of Juarez or not, I took pains to point out that I am not a war correspondent by any definition. One way you can tell this about me is that I write lengthy blogposts about whether or not I should go …
Tipplin’ like Toddlers
“I couldn’t discipline him, because he wasn’t acting up. He was drunk.” That from the mother of little Niko van Heest, a 15-month-old who was allegedly served sangria at Olive Garden this week, just days after a Michigan toddler actually got quite shitfaced when Applebee’s served him margarita instead of apple juice. Little margarita-man’s family is …
Yuri Gagarin, First Kosmonaut
Fifty years ago today, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space, preceded only by dogs and rockets. Twenty years ago, in a profoundly less celebrated event, I started learning Russian in a public high school classroom in San Francisco. The first essay I ever translated from our Russian textbooks was a short …