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To: Social Security Administration, Office of Public Inquiries and Communications Support 1100 West High Rise 6401 Security Blvd. Baltimore, MD 21235 From: Gail Wells 4760 Roark Drive Richland, WA 99352 This is to inform you that I plan to give my $90 one-time Medicare payment to the campaign of John Duresky, the Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives in Washington’s 4th Congressional District, where I live. I received the payment this week from the Social Secu

If ever I doubted that the President of the United States has slid headlong into Orwell-ville, I was convinced by his speech last Thursday evening, in which he perseverated for a rambling hour or so on his Stolen Election fantasy. It’s a drearily familiar hobbyhorse for him, so I wasn’t too surprised to learn that two of the major networks declined to air the whole thing start to finish, instead making it available from their streaming platforms along with live comments and c

Our country’s 250th birthday has got me musing about patriotism in this uncertain time. It’s brought to mind two events of my youth that express what patriotism used to mean to me. One. I’m a fifth-grader in the Coos Bay All-City Choir. Six hundred kids are packed into the bleachers above the Marshfield High basketball court, and we’re singing “America the Beautiful” in our rough sweet young voices, and suddenly I am enveloped in a rush of liquid light that permeates my bod

I’ve just finished “Eva Moves the Furniture,” by Margot Livesey. Consistent with my aim of picking the brains of writers I admire, I wanted to look more closely at Livesey’s undramatic, seemingly artless prose. I’ll start by quoting a passage to show what I mean. In this piece Eva is recounting her aunt Lily’s memory of a frightening event that happened when Eva was a baby. Eva introduces the vignette as an adult, in the story’s present time: “That spring I caught bronchi

The writer Kathryn Schulz has a terrific book review in the Feb. 16-23 issue of The New Yorker , about a biography of the poet Alfred Tennyson. The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief, by Richard Holmes, sets the poet’s life against the backdrop of the mid-Victorian explosion of new scientific discoveries—fossils, deep time, other galaxies, mass extinctions, the mutability of species—and how these overturned settled ideas of a static nature, a

In the New York Times yesterday was a survey asking readers to compare two passages of writing in each of five genres (literary fiction, fantasy, science writing, historical fiction, and poetry). One passage was written by a human author; the other generated by Claude, Anthropic’s A.I. large-language model. The question asked was, Which one sounds better to you? But I knew the real task was to see if I could distinguish between “real” writing and “fake” A.I. text. Easy-

My knee, which has been acting up ever since we went back to Portland for Sammy's birthday, seems to be calming down. Ups and downs still give me trouble--I've missed our All Saints group's regular Monday hikes