About Susan Orlean: Susan Orlean is an American journalist and author. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed articles to many magazines including Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside.
I once had a boyfriend who couldn't write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties; it was like he was a grown-...
Television wasn't getting rid of animals, but they were no longer cast as creatures that were omniscient and heroic. They were talking horses like Mr Ed or an absurdist pig like Arnold Ziffle...Just like the heroic animals in silent films became come...
My ace in the hole as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend, I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on, and I would record it in my Filofax calendar.
I want a chainsaw very badly, because I think cutting down a tree would be unbelievably satisfying. I have asked for a chainsaw for my birthday, but I think I'll probably be given jewelry instead.
One of my favorite activities as a teen-ager was to watch television over the phone with my best friend.
One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.
When a machine can do something better and faster than a person can, I am happy to let the machine do it.
You could go crazy thinking of how unprivate our lives really are - the omnipresent security cameras, the tracking data on our very smart phones, the porous state of our Internet selves, the trail of electronic crumbs we leave every day.
I remember three- and four-week-long snow days, and drifts so deep a small child, namely me, could get lost in them. No such winter exists in the record, but that's how Ohio winters seemed to me when I was little - silent, silver, endless, and dreamy...
A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.
I'm happy to be reminded that an ordinary day full of nothing but nothingness can make you feel like you've won the lottery.
In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.
I had forgotten how thrilling a snow day is until my son started school, and as much as he loves it, he swoons at the idea of a free day arriving unexpectedly, laid out like a gift.
Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it's all gone sideways.
Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand.
When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop; there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with latex membranes or strobes.
I finally overcame my phobia, and now I approach flying with a sort of studied boredom - a learned habit, thanks to my learn-to-fly-calmly training - but like all former flying phobics, I retain a weird and feverish fascination with aviation news, es...
Places like Hilton Head, with water adjacency and nice climates, are in high demand, and land values are insane. In the case of Hilton Head, which was developed in 1970 on what had been a mosquito- and alligator-infested swampy barrier island, land v...
'Brave' is one of those words that has been bleached of most of its meaning these days, thanks to far too many appearances in the glaring light of ad slogans and corporate public relations. I never thought about anything as brave anymore; it just see...
I rarely listen to commercial radio, and when I do, I'm shocked by how many ads there are, and how annoying they are, and how bad the radio station usually is.
