Workmen were pulling up the tattered red carpets of our college chapel at Oxford, which meant that our choir was temporarily homeless for our weekly Wednesday rehearsal. After casting around that afternoon for alternative spaces, our music director came up with a solution: we crossed Holywell Street and entered the grounds of nearby New College,…
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On the eve of International Women’s Day, a standing-room only crowd of a hundred or so people squeezed into an upper gallery of Oxford University’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, a place known to generations of British school children as where they saw shrunken heads. The tsantsa, or shrunken heads, were removed from their display cases in 2020…
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One of my recent discoveries in Oxford has been the Falcon Boat Club, founded by a group of pleasure-boating men from Holywell Church in 1869 and initially based out of of my local pub, The King’s Arms. Unlike most of Oxford’s rowing clubs, it admitted women as members from its beginnings, more than 150 years…
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My first Saturday in Oxford, I walk down the Banbury Road towards St. Giles Church. My small roller bag click clacks over the broken sidewalk. Bells peal in a melodic succession:123456…654321. At first, the ringing seems to be coming from a dated glass and concrete building – a structure, I learned, that some locals consider…
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In the early days of the pandemic, I began sculling on a creek flowing into the San Francisco Bay – a waterway that’s home to egrets, herons, and the occasional northern spotted owl. Wearing a mask inside the boathouse, I joined other fledgling rowers on a novice master’s team. Four years later, I’m still rowing…
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We’re all connected. I was reminded of that when a neighbor mentioned he’d read my story for Alta Journal about traveling to the Arctic Circle last fall. One sentence leapt out at him: “Nothing seemed fixed: water, stars, sky, or people. It was all changing and rotating and moving in a dance governed by randomness.”…
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The subject line was “Hello from New York Times Opinion.” It landed in my inbox about 24-hours after the horrific wildfires on Maui had begun to spread. I’d already checked in with friends who live on the island, to make sure they were safe. Like the rest of the world, I was watching in horror…
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Last fall, I took part in an unusual residency program in the Arctic Circle. I spent two and a half weeks aboard Antigua, a three-masted sailing ship with 29 artists and writers on an expedition to explore the Svalbard archipelago. It was quite a trip. I wrote a story about my experience for the current…
Read MoreFounded in 1931 during the depths of America’s Great Depression, the Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards celebrates its 92nd anniversary this year and tonight is the award’s ceremony. Please join us at 6 p.m. PT to honor some of the state’s most distinguished writers. It will be streaming at https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2023-06-05/92nd-annual-california-book-awards The purpose of the awards…
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