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On the Newtons, blood, and bank-robbing cousins
My dad’s forebears were glad to tell you about my grandma’s Pre-Revolutionary Virginian ancestor and other lofty relations, but they seemed to suffer from a peculiarly targeted kind of amnesia when you...
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May 21, 2011: The Rapture meets my 40th birthday
It would probably be funny if I hadn’t grown up in absolute terror of being Left Behind. Okay, it’s funny anyway, as long as I don’t have to be sober. My latest piece for The Awl is about the...
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Doubter in the Holy Land
My Lives piece about visiting Jerusalem is in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. A friend and I were beginning that strange dance of making plans to make plans, when I mentioned that I’d be...
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More Ancestry Ponderings at The Begats
I’m working on a book about the science and superstition of ancestry, and my new site, The Begats, ponders ancestry miscellany of all kinds: genealogical, historical, cultural, scientific, religious,...
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America’s Ancestry Craze: My Harper’s cover story
My essay, “America’s Ancestry Craze,” illustrated with Chuck Close’s “Emma,” is the cover story of the June issue of Harper’s! It’s an outgrowth of a longtime obsession, as people who visited this...
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Random House Will Publish My Ancestry Book
I’m ecstatic to announce that Andrea Walker of Random House has acquired my forthcoming book on the science and superstition of ancestry, a subject that has obsessed me for years because of my own...
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My essay’s on newsstands until June 17 or so
Ancestry is a fundamental perplexity of life. We come from our parents, who came from their parents, who descended, as the Bible would put it, from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, but we are...
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Like We Say Back Home, Vol. 3
In the past couple years my mom has taught me and reminded me of a few more of my Texan granny’s favorite expressions. Some highlights: Quiet as a little mouse peeing on cotton. (Usually used when...
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The Family Tree: Talks with Writers on Ancestry, for Tin House
I’ve always been interested in the ways writers think about family history—and especially about echoes, or the lack thereof, through the generations—if they do, as they work. I’m grateful to Tin...
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Family Tree: Slate, Tin House, Begats
At Slate, Ariel Bogle recaps a discussion I had last week with AJ Jacobs, Wilhelmina Rhodes-Kelly, and Chris Whitten on how technology is affecting the family tree. I talked a little bit about what...
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