An Elegy for Vancouver Summer

Rising Temperatures and Raging Wildfires Have Me Dreading My Favorite Season—And Mourning the Splendid Days of My Childhood

Last summer was my first in my new apartment. I’d moved into the building in the fall, several weeks into a cool Vancouver November. The trees were bare, and our famous winter rain had set in for its months-long stay, but I stood on my balcony, looking out over the cityscape and mountains behind it, and thought: This will be heaven in summer.

Buildings in the Pacific Northwest are built for cold, despite our relatively mild winters. They’re made of wood and insulated, or of concrete, which retains heat naturally. Mine, …

Where I Go: The Candy Wrapper Museum

Your Trash Is My Treasure—And a Sweet Reminder of the Past

In 2019, an unassuming package arrived at my front door.

Inside was a sooty 2-by-4-foot scrapbook filled with candy wrappers over 70 years old. On the surface, a piece of trash—one …

In Praise of the Postcard

A Seemingly Obsolete Technology Invites Us to Ruminate on the Possibilities of the Past and the Future

The postcard selection on Vis, Croatia’s most remote island, was not terribly appealing. I considered a card adorned with a photograph of boats in the old harbor. Surely, I thought, …

Party Like It’s 1999, Again

What Gen Z’s Displaced Nostalgia for the Decade of Mixtapes, Friends, and Ripped Jeans Says About Us

At the end of the 1990s, all anyone could talk about was the impending Y2K doomsday—that moment on January 1, 2000, when computers would think our calendars had all flipped …

Nostalgia’s Ingenious Potential | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Nostalgia’s Ingenious Potential

Often Associated With People Who Are Angry About a Lost Past, These Feelings of Longing Can Help Inspire an Inclusive Future

When 19-year-old Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer first coined the term “nostalgia” in 1688, he had wanderers on his mind.

With this neologism, Hofer was describing the deep melancholy—a “wasting …