Arizona gets hot — we all know this. But you can actually climb in southern Arizona year round! Mount Lemmon is a sport climbing mecca. There are crags from 2,000 feet to 9,000 feet elevation, up a beautiful winding road onto the mountain, and many of them have very short, accessible approaches. In the winter, you can start your day skiing at the top and end with a sweaty climbing session lower down! We climbed Read more…
There’s nothing better than a desert in early spring, and nothing more reinvigorating than days on end of sunshine in the depths of winter. So it makes sense that the height of tourist season in hot and sunny Arizona is winter and spring! We’ve been going to Tucson in February for a few years (cough Gem and Mineral Show cough), but the highlight for me is getting outside hiking and climbing and exploring. Here’s a Read more…
There are some places everyone thinks of when they think sport climbing in the US – Yosemite in California, Red River Gorge in Kentucky, Red Rocks in Nevada. I’m here to tell you that you should add Puerto Rico to your list. There’s limestone for days: impressive karst formations rising right up from a gorgeous white sand beach, jagged blue cliffs jutting out of the jungle, and everything in between. When we hiked up to Read more…
Puerto Rico hosts the only tropical rainforest in the United States, and even if you don’t get a ticketed entry to El Yunque National Forest, you can still experience it! If you’re into massive hikes Puerto Rico might let you down—because it’s a small island and trail building in the jungle is tough, most of the trails are quite short by mainland standards. The longest ones we could find were about 6 miles long. But Read more…
Like the rest of the internet, I’ve been playing around with Chat-GPT. It’s remarkable in so many ways — writing fluidly and coherently, putting together sentences and paragraphs, pulling information from the vast swathes of data upon which it was trained. We marvel: It would take humans hours to find this information, if we even could! How long I would have to scour keyword-manipulated Google searches to learn so much! If I even could! Of Read more…
Another arbitrary chunk of time to which we’ve collectively decided to assign meaning has passed! Therefore I’m looking back on the books I’ve read since the last time we bought new calendars and picking some favorites. If you read these three books, I’m sure you’ll notice a pattern—climate change loomed large for me this year. And every year, let’s be honest. I read a lot of books this year that made me smile or swept Read more…
This year, my reading goal was 80 books. I decided I would read fewer than 2021 so I would focus more on longer books, rather than optimizing for sheer quantity. I went past my goal by just a little. By 142, to be exact. I know some people read more than this, but most people don’t. Just a few years ago, this would have seemed like an insane tally. And it wasn’t like reading took Read more…
This tweet inspired me to follow up on the piece about AI art and writing that I published yesterday. I couldn’t agree more. In 2011, a venture capitalist wrote that software was eating the world. More than a decade on, I think it’s fair to say that today, the technology eating the world is artificial intelligence. From the algorithms that amplify hate to the chatbots that mimic writing to the deepfakes that manipulate news, machine Read more…
Lately, there’s been a lot of discourse about the impact of AI art and writing, and I’ll admit that I feel a bit of trepidation about the abilities of recently-unveiled artificial intelligence projects. There are so many possibilities to fear—its ability to replace creative workers, the hollowness of its art, the rampant intellectual property theft. I’m not that interested in wading into the debate about how human-like it is (this doesn’t ultimately matter to me, Read more…
I’ve started sharing a new manuscript with beta readers to get early feedback. The main character of this manuscript is autistic — like me! And while I’ve gotten some great suggestions on the manuscript as a whole, I’ve also gotten some feedback that is…not so great. When an autistic person shares their fiction featuring autistic characters with you, a neurotypical person, here are some things to keep in mind. I think a lot of this Read more…