The human on the other end of your writing’s rejection Many years ago, I used to submit personal essays for publication on a regular basis. To Salon, specifically, which had a thriving reputation as the place to publish personal essays. I can’t remember why, but when it came to personal…

A new book reminds us of the pleasures of reconnecting with ordinary sound I recently spent a few days by myself at a cabin rented out by the U.S. Forest Service. I try to do this a couple of times a year — there’s no internet or mobile phone service…

They’re meant to keep pedestrians safe. Instead, they perpetuate car dominance. Supposedly, jaywalking laws save lives. Pedestrian lives, specifically. That’s what we’re told anyway. But their real accomplishment is to ensure the continuance of car dominance on public roads, which was a goal going back to when jaywalking laws first came into being in the early 1900s. Prior to the 1920s…

Loneliness is an epidemic. We need the daily, in-person interactions walkability provides. This essay is reprinted from the History News Network via George Washington University. A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom — One Step at a Time is available wherever books are sold. Until the 1920s to…

Letters of a Woman Homesteader, Soil, and the Absence of Mothers’ Stories I recently finished reading Camille T. Dungy’s new book Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. It’s an incredible work, bringing together gardening, ecology, America’s history of racism and ongoing violence against anyone who isn’t white, and…

Can we make a walkable life a breathable life, too? I recently read James Nestor’s bestselling book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, which, despite its subtitle, is a straightforward deep-dive into a simple act that all of us perform all day every day as long as we’re…

Finding our way without GPS is food for the hippocampus I have an attachment to paper maps, having used them to get lost — and found — in many a forest and many a foreign city long before the advent of smartphone apps. …

Our bodies don’t exist outside of nature In her book Movement Matters, biomechanist Katy Bowman makes a case for the importance of movement in our lives — not fitness confined to an hour on an exercise machine, but real-life movement: walking, foraging, strolling, meandering, running a bit, playing. For hours. The kinds of movement our species evolved…

Locomotion studies are ready for a new foundation The human body is subject to innumerable metaphors: Our brains are computers with immense processing power; our bodies are machines that need to be tuned and honed and oiled and optimized. But metaphors are just that — metaphors. While they’re useful for interpreting and explaining the world to ourselves, they…