I want to love the wild. I really, really do. I’m hiking up the Pipiwai Trail near Hana, Maui when the open landscape of moss, ferns, and majestic banyan trees suddenly gives way to bamboo forest. Thousands of stalks, just inches from each other, reach 80 feet into the air…

An immodest proposal for a new world order. Hear me out. VIRTUE SIGNAL: In my twenties, when brick and mortar porn shops still existed, I drove over to the triple-X video store in Sacramento with a sign that said, “PORN DEGRADES WOMEN.” That was the same year I threw my…

The first eight months of 2001 had not been great. My dad and brother had both gone into rehab, each for their own personal poison. In July, I’d abruptly been fired. One moment I was sitting in my quiet office at a national magazine, the next an HR woman was…

The problem isn’t turbulence. The problem is existential dread. It’s 4 a.m., and I’m lying on the floor of the aft galley on a Boeing 737 headed for Mexico City. The cabin is dark, most of the passengers asleep. But back here in the service area behind the toilets, in…

As a kid, I reveled in horror movies. In college, I migrated to moody foreign and indie films like Betty Blue and Paris Texas. But the accretion of my own adult problems and my awareness of the world’s perennial suffering soon led me away from dark films to the escapist…