"You just keep thinking, Butch. That's what you're good at." -The Sundance Kid

• Unaccompanied // Death is difficult, but death is the price of the wildness that makes life worth living at all: on the death of my father.

• Water's Edge // In the woods along the Mississippi River, the risks and rewards of "camp life"

• The Many Creations of a River Valley // Our few decades are a imperceptible blip next to the life of a river.

• Review: Miss Jane // New Brad Watson novel a wondrous achievement
• Review: Uniting Mississippi // What will it take to get Mississippi's leaders to pay attention?
• Review: Dispatches From Pluto // This is a Delta story, a genre that "makes a mockery of the usual standards of cause and effect."

• There's No Such Thing as Math People // Mathematical ability is not fixed, we're just teaching it wrong. (Republished in the Houston Chronicle.)

• To Boldly Go // Star Trek, technology, and our moral sense.
• Country Shit // The trouble with country music.
• You Can Go Home Again // Revisiting suburbia.
• Ghost Webs // Unhooking from the web.
• Seven Ways of Looking at a Motel Room // A road trip search for meaning.
• A Password to Indianola’s Cotton Fields  // Am I a boomer, or a sticker?