Walter Kirn

The squirrel is a lonesome, worried, restless creature. It lives on its own, without allies, without protectors. It has its teeth and claws. It has its acorns. It hoards its acorns, as many as it can gather, because, for a squirrel, the future is uncertain, and it knows not to count on help, … Continue Reading

Among the planet’s major predator species, only humans nurture their own prey. While other predators coldly stalk their victims before they ravage them, we humans — we modern humans — prefer to spend time with them and win their trust before we slay them and masticate their flesh. This practice has … Continue Reading

Dogs are profoundly earthbound creatures. They dig in the dirt, hiding bones and chunks of carrion. They sleep on the ground and love to roll in mud, and they follow their noses, attracted by musky scents. They pursue rodents and rabbits into holes. And dogs’ wild cousins, of course, give birth in … Continue Reading

Can a cat support a person? Not support a person financially (we all know of cases in which large felines, particularly lions, serve as the lucrative main attractions of touring circus acts and Las Vegas showroom extravaganzas), but can a cat support a person emotionally? Can a creature of famously … Continue Reading

I’ve never experienced horizontal turbulence. Twenty minutes before its scheduled landing at Washington Reagan airport, our plane is sliding from side to side like a teacup on a Ouija board spelling out the words You’re going to die. As instructed by the crew, I fold and stow my seatback table — an … Continue Reading

Panic thrives when information is scarce. All last summer and fall in Horry County, South Carolina, the easternmost county in the state and home to countless sunbirds and retirees in communities such as Myrtle Beach, scattered sightings of gargantuan brown members of an avian species roiled and … Continue Reading

Peanut the squirrel was a leaper. He loved to leap. In videos of his seven happy years of domesticated cohabitation with a lively American family named the Longos, seldom was he seen to creep or scurry in the manner of duller, more earthbound rodents. Antic Peanut was always catching air. Down from … Continue Reading

Before my father even built it, he told me the cabin would be mine someday. It was an old trick of his: serving himself in the present in such a way that his action could be construed as a future service to me, thereby obligating me to him. In this case, he would gain a second home, a wilderness … Continue Reading

Imagine standing on a wooden dock beside a coastal Alaska inlet. Around you are fishing boats tied up their moorings, gently bobbing on the sparkling water. The picturesque craft have just returned to harbor, their bounteous catches transferred from their holds to nearby processing plants and … Continue Reading

It’s said that real communism has never been tried (an old joke), but those who say so likely have never visited the tiny Mormon town of Orderville, Utah, set in a long, broad valley of red-rock buttes along the Virgin River. Cut off from the interstate highways of America by the Grand Canyon to … Continue Reading

Welcome, bug friends! Welcome back! After lengthy underground gestations of 13 and 17 years, two distinct groups of cicadas numbering in the trillions are emerging in tandem across parts of America this spring, from the balmy peach orchards of Georgia to the breezy corn fields of Illinois. … Continue Reading

One unsettling way to spend a weekend in our Republic of Occluded Facts is to drive to a small mountain town in Colorado, ditch your phone because it gets no signal (and is a spying device in any case) and speak for hour after trippy hour about aliens and their weird craft with a man who purports … Continue Reading

The headlines that morning in Pocatello, Idaho, were grim for a town of 57,000 people. I read them in the local paper at Elmer’s Restaurant while enjoying the house specialty, a “German pancake” with a crisp, raised rim that held the syrup and butter in a neat pool. A 27-year-old man had been … Continue Reading

Our nation is under siege.  For months now, Americans young and old from every region have faced a series of terrible assaults from savage interlopers, attacks that have no parallel in recent memory. So frequent have these incidents become that it’s impossible to list them all, let alone give … Continue Reading

I took the pills in the car, and when they hit, they wiped out my memory of having taken them, so I took another two. I knew this because Amanda, my new then-girlfriend, said to me, “You already took some, Walt!” I believe the pills were Valium — I don’t remember now. My mother, a registered nurse, … Continue Reading

It’s been another year of progress at our beloved Princeton University, as Old Nassau grows more inclusive and diverse with each incoming class. For Princetonians of conscience, the profoundly problematic legacy of Woodrow Wilson, our racist former president, remains a challenge, of course, and … Continue Reading

Randy, a husky old crust in a tall hat and a striped, blue western shirt, sits on a stool at The Star Hotel and Bar — since 1910 the social crossroads of downtown Elko, Nevada — drinking a glass of bitter Picon punch, a specialty of this traditional Basque restaurant. It’s three PM on a Friday, the … Continue Reading

The US Postal Service is an unsung bastion of our democracy. In all sorts of weather, day after day, to people of every background and description — even during pandemics — it delivers! But lately this most essential institution has come under attack. In Rochester, New Hampshire in October, a brave … Continue Reading

Faith is powerful! Seldom has an appeal for heavenly aid been so miraculously answered as it was in the case of Peggy Jones, 64, a resident of Silsbee, Texas, who was riding her tractor one evening in late July when a large snake came tumbling from the sky and attached itself to her arm with cruel … Continue Reading

For tourists and residents alike, fair week in Warren County is always thrilling, a chance to celebrate the bounty of the central Iowa countryside, but this year an unexpected air of drama hangs over the annual festivities. The mystery of the bold, aggressive bobcat which has been haunting our area … Continue Reading

The Miracle of America Museum in Polson, Montana is a maze of hallways, niches, nooks, barns, garages, sheds, and open yards packed with an array of objects, from lunch boxes to fighter jets. Hallucinatory in its variety but simple in its mission, it is less a museum than a sermon in junk, the … Continue Reading