The know-nothing animal: Our costly addiction to willful ignorance

As philosophers have long noted, human beings are remarkable, in part, for being the sort of beings for whom the very fact of being matters. It’s an existentialist observation that sounds very lofty and celebratory until you consider that we are, simultaneously, driven to cover up and deny knowledge about existence, including suffering, destruction, and […]

Egocentric cats and narcissistic humans: the mysterious minds of others

“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” Wittgenstein For the second night in a row, my dog, restless from storms, has woken me up. Her routine involves walking on my sternum and neck, and panting midnight dog breath onto my innocent face until I escort her downstairs for an interlude of Netflix […]

Daring to speak the impossible language of beauty

After some years of both admiring and cringing at reviewers’ efforts to translate scent into words, it finally occurred to me that the very impossibility of doing so was part of the attraction, that if one could, finally, once and for all, verbally reduce the scent of Amouage’s Jubilation XXV or Guerlain’s Apres L’onde, then […]

An invisible woman with an invisible dog

The first dog I had as an adult was spectacular, an enormous, mostly black Malamute. Adults gawped, and kids would sometimes ask from a respectful distance, “Is he a wolf?” Though it’s been decades, there are people in that town who still remember me as that magnificent dog’s companion, folks who recall the tableau of […]

When the MAGA fashion police decide you’re a faggot

I was walking across a Menard’s parking lot a couple of months before the 2016 election when a car swerved toward me as if to run me down. It was a fortyish white guy in a white Buick with a red Trump bumper sticker. He got so close I could see the McDonald’s cup in […]

Zoologist Perfumes: animal subjectivity and empathetic imagination

Because, for most people, perfume is mainly about smelling good, niche perfumes — those that, by definition, do not aim to be pleasing to the masses — can be confounding. How, in God’s name, could anyone want to smell like a bat’s cave, oily rubber, or, gasp, a slightly warm armpit encased in a leather […]

My old dog’s nose: On equanimity and aging

My two hound mixes have been dead for a couple of years now, and all I’m left with is this terrier-chihuahua something-or-other who occasionally looks more like a cartoon rendering than an actual dog. Battle-scarred, bug-eyed, and half-deaf, she’s adapted over the years by pushing more and more of her consciousness into her nose. And […]