Houseplant hospital
How to keep your plants alive over the winter By Soncirey MitchellReader Staff Winter is peak mortality season for desk cactuses and bathroom ferns, which suddenly seem to brown and wilt when the weather...
Category: Back of the Book
It makes sense, unfortunately
By Zach HagadoneReader Staff The first 12 months of Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president have been a bonanza for historians. Comparisons and analogies abound, and the “history repeats itself” cliche is doing...
Afraid to turn away
By Ben OlsonReader Staff With the publication of our fifth annual 208 Fiction winners and honorable mentions in this edition (see Pages 14-16), I thought I’d share one of my own short stories. I...
New year, same drink
By Soncirey MitchellReader Staff New Year’s Eve parties and Champagne toasts go hand-in-hand in the modern imagination, but though the beloved sparkling wine is now an institution, it had a long, forgotten history of...
Man bites back at dogs
By Zach HagadoneReader Staff Among the quickest ways to get yourself in trouble is pointing out that all dogs are not God’s perfect creatures, nor do they belong in every space where humans conduct...
Don’t give up the light: An allegory
By Ben OlsonReader Staff A long time ago, the people of Sandpoint lived in darkness. When the cold winter months set in, Sandpointians were left to navigate to and from work on streets without...
The search for immortality
By Soncirey MitchellReader Staff Facebook is a monument to the dead and dying. There are an estimated 30 million accounts for deceased users, and an analysis by University of Oxford researchers suggests that the...
In praise of ‘performative reading’
By Zach HagadoneReader Staff The New Yorker carried an interesting piece on its website Dec. 2 titled “Now Watch Me Read,” in which Brady Brickner-Wood explores the idea of “performative reading.” That is, the...
The moment defined us
By Ben OlsonReader Staff History gives us moments; crossroads in the timeline of our lives that force a direction one way or another. The decisions we make when presented with these moments define our...
Idaho magic
By Soncirey MitchellReader Staff Growing up in Sandpoint means learning to identify “Idaho magic” — and I don’t mean admiring the sun-drenched mountains or the sparkles on the snow. For local kids, Idaho magic...
