The violent shooting deaths of eight marine mammals on the shores of Puget Sound near Seattle is not just disturbing news followed around the world -- it's personal. And statistics don't tell the whole story.

For those of us who live near Puget Sound -- known...

Every holiday season, our Metropolitan Singers perform concerts in retirement centers as part of our Seattle Glee Clubs' community service. It's musical light during these darkest days of the year, live music to accompany those elders who often can't get out and about for other concerts. So we...

Is your shopping list bigger than your budget? Here are some gift ideas that are free and yet very meaningful. They may even be the most precious and well-received gifts of all.

So drop out of those manic holiday shopping crowds. Light a fire, stay...

The day after seeing the movie The Help, I had a vivid dream: I am asked to watch over Obama's two daughters, Sasha and Malia. We enjoy ourselves immensely. We visit a bookstore, much like the one President Obama visited with his daughters on Thanksgiving weekend. We share a wonderful...

I have never been ashamed of my alma mater, UC Davis, until I watched the video of the police pepper spraying peaceful protesters -- young students who looked a lot like my peers in the 1960s when we protested the Vietnam War. Then, we sat on railroad tracks to stop...

In the 1970s, when I was an editorial assistant at The New Yorker magazine -- and getting many rejections -- I used to fanaticize about being my own publisher. "Give yourself ten years to finish a book," one of the revered New Yorker editors advised me. "Think of it as...

When my decade-long, unofficial marriage ended, I spent a year sorting through shared belongings. At last in the bedroom, I parted with the Hawaiian quilt stitched with dolphins; I recycled our comforter -- now worn with the happiness of desire, our winter coziness, the startling confession of an affair. But...

This week, the New York Times ran an op-ed "Why the Anti-Christ Matters in Politics?" Is the venerable "gray lady," at last waking up to the very real and troubling consequences of End Times and Rapture beliefs in American politics? During the Bush years, and now as we...

A local Seattle radio had a plan to commemorate 9/11 -- release 3,000 balloons. It seemed like a simple enough way to remember our fallen heroes. But then, a listening marine biologist sounded the urgent warning: "Balloons kill marine and terrestrial wildlife." Do we really want to commemorate 9/11 by...

The wolf hunt that begins this week in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana is as grim as the Grimm's fairy tale. Ever since the bloody wolf-delisting rider was slipped into a recent budget bill, this myth is driving wildlife politics. And it's still the same ending: The wolf must die. The...

"This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through."

Fervently, we sang this hymn in the Southern Baptist churches of my childhood. We also had many sermons about flying up with other righteous believers in the imminent Rapture and cheerfully leaving this "Late, Great Planet Earth" behind....

"Shocking" new scientific reports of the self-destructive abuse of our blue planet's oceans are enough to make anyone feel blue. Not just those of us on the coasts or who've studied marine life for many years. Without healthy oceans -- the fertile wombs of our worlds -- we land dwellers...

When California preacher, Harold Camping, predicted the world would end this Saturday evening, several of my Rapture-ready friends insisted I finish reading the Left Behind series and make my preparations.

Camping's ubiquitous billboard messages: "Blow the trumpet, warn the people!" were all over Seattle. People were so...

The day the tsunami struck Japan, Apple launched its tsunami-seller, the iPad2. My calendar for 3.11.11 -- the date of the massive 9.0 earthquake -- was steady:

1. Write
2. Teach
3. 5 p.m.: Stand in line for iPad2

When the first iPad was unleashed, like Harry Potter's...

For almost three decades I've lived here in Seattle on the Salish Sea and my apartment is like a glassed in aquarium. Often the waves are fierce and winds howling, so I sleep in my noise-canceling headphones. Our coasts have frequent tsunami drills. Last night, I was just about to...

"Doesn't the End of Nature also mean the End of Us?" one of my young writing students asks, echoing a fatalism that both frightens and compels the next generations.

I study this young man with his black hoodie sweatshirt, his brooding Twilight eyes. Tongue piercings and tattoos mark his rank...

When I showed up for my first day of work at The New Yorker magazine in 1972, I was greeted by my theatrically busy boss, Mrs. Harriet Walden, "Quick, quick, we've got three deadlines today!"

Mrs. Walden ran her twentieth-floor editorial pool with manic efficiency and decorum. We must be...

Whenever I'm feeling blue or stressed, I drag out the cat toys or toss the squeaky ball with my neighbor's husky. Watching my Siamese and Tuxedo cats leap, pounce, and pirouette mid-air, I am suddenly smiling -- and, most importantly, not taking myself so seriously.

I have always placed a...

In the cold, dawn light of Yellowstone's Lamar Valley, I watched the Crystal Creek wolf pack at play. It was 1995, and these were the first wolves to return to Yellowstone in 60 years. Fifteen years ago, we had no idea of how successful and popular wolf reintroduction would be....

For over two decades, I've been studying and writing about cetaceans, those whale and dolphin mammal cousins whose brain size, close-knit family societies, and communication skills rival our own. Thirty million years older than homo sapiens, dolphins are our evolutionary elders. We have so much to learn from them about...