Again and again I've heard the phrase "you don't want to know how the sausage is made" or some variation of that. It has a metaphorical meaning, of course: ...

I've spent parts of the last few days defending baseball to various people who accost me for liking it. Well, not accost, necessarily. Admittedly I'm the one ...

I was on the way to my first academic conference as a professor, and I'd forgotten my shoes. There was no way around it. We were already cruising in the ...

Part 1 It was the eve of my first big academic conference as a university faculty member, and I was packing. I'd travel from Iowa City to Pittsburgh, ...

When I was a little kid, I would rig rooms in tape and string, running them across the space wall to wall, imagining a complex machine or elaborate fort. The ...

I have lived almost all my life either in tiny student housing or with family members who knew more about maintaining homes than I did. And now in my first ...

I put seed out on my porch because I want to attract the good birds. No offense, sparrows and wrens. You're rare sometimes. and you can sing, and your flocks ...

One of the best games to play driving at night on the highway is to try and identify vehicles by their headlights. We all do this, I think, whether conscious ...

You hear a lot about "sweater weather" in the fall. How it gets colder, but in some ways that's OK, because it means we can start wearing our favorite ...

I'm a bird fan, and after moving into a new apartment with a deck, I decided that the outdoor space was not for me, but for them. I got two feeders: a ...

Birders have what we call a life list. On it are the birds that we'd be happy to see even one time in our entire lives. Often they are birds we've been ...

If you ask any Colorado Rockies fan what their most hated baseball team is, their answer had darn well better come from California. Within those ...

It's a misunderstood (by me) procedure employed by big trucks on Interstate highways. I just drove 3,000 miles in two weeks, most of it spent along ...

Undercutting the state university system might appear economical in the short term, but it will be costly in other ways. This week in Iowa: fear and ...

A recent kid's simple rules for keeping your trick-or-treaters happy Being 23 means I'm old enough that I can imagine buying candy for ...

It's cheaper to fly from New York to Islamabad and from Denver to Riverton As an out-of-state college student, I've been affected several times by ...