Natural Wonders
When we were young, spontaneous, and not yet admitting to ourselves that we would one day marry, my husband and I moved to London. One year, we didn't go home for the holidays, forgoing expectations, instead hopping the Eurostar to Paris for sheer fun.
9/11 and Everything After: On Bearing Witness to History Through the Eyes of My Daughter
On September 11th, 2001 I was an 18-year-old NYU sophomore. I lived on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street in Manhattan in a pre-war building with a charming, but unstable roommate. I woke up that morning to the sound of dozens of fire trucks racing down Fifth Avenue, some carrying first responders who would not survive the day. But I didn’t know that yet. Maybe they did. They were only sirens to me then.
Hello, You Are Here
Whether you see them as cosmic coincidences or the unfolding of fate, a chain reaction of unlikely events led to you being here. Author Sasha Sagan—a consequence of the cosmos in and of herself, the daughter of acclaimed astronomer Carl Sagan—sheds light on what we know about how you got here and, more importantly, what we don’t know.
Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father
We lived in a sandy-colored stone house with an engraved winged serpent and solar disc above the door. It seemed like something straight out of ancient Sumeria, or Indiana Jones — but it was not, in either case, something you’d expect to find in upstate New York. It overlooked a deep gorge, and beyond that the city of Ithaca. At the turn of the last century it had been the headquarters for a secret society at Cornell called the Sphinx Head Tomb, but in the second half of the century some bedrooms and a kitchen were added and, by the 1980s, it had been converted into a private home where I lived with my wonderful mother and father.
I Think About This A Lot: One Line From The Simpsons
On Easter Sunday, 1999, the Simpsons aired an episode titled “Simpsons Bible Stories.” The conceit of the episode is that Bart and his family fall asleep in church, and Reverend Lovejoy’s dry monotone sermon seeps into their dreams, making for a few reliably subversive interpretations of some of the Bible’s greatest hits. Homer and Marge are Adam and Eve. Ned Flanders is God. Bart is David to school bully Nelson’s Goliath — that sort of thing.
The Empty Space
Whenever a shift occurs in her life, even if it's something small—a restaurant goes out of business, a teacup shatters—my mother always says the same thing: "There is no refuge from change in the cosmos."
Some changes are lightning fast. Others take a long time to fully reveal themselves. When a star dies, the darkness left by its absence ripples through the universe at the speed of light, which may seem impossibly fast—but over the great distances of space, even that isn't fast enough. The dead stars appear to shine, but in reality they're long gone.
Love Song
Jon and I were still newlyweds the year we found ourselves in Washington, D.C., the week of my birthday. Somehow he'd secured a reservation at a restaurant we'd been fantasizing about for months, which served works of gastronomic art—mojito orbs, popcorn in liquid nitrogen. We knew the meal would be surreal. We didn't know the cab ride to the restaurant would be, too.
Death-Defying Boat Ride
The water had been calm when my husband, Jon, and I arrived, by rickety old boat, at the remote, rustic three-room hotel on a tiny island in the Rosario archipelago, off the Colombian coast. But days later, as we hopped aboard the same boat for the hour-long trip back to the mainland, things had changed. I soon spotted whitecaps in the near distance. When we reached them, the boat began to repeatedly rise and sharply drop. The drops were so violent, they lifted me inches off my seat. I felt my brain rattling in my skull. It was like riding an unbroken horse.
Moving Out of New York City
New York City is one of the great loves of my life. I grew up four and a half hours away, in Ithaca—but when, at 3 years old, I stayed with my parents in a Manhattan hotel, I looked up at them and said, "This is my home." Eventually, it was: I moved there at 17, when I enrolled at New York University. I felt a chest-swelling pride every day, as though I'd accomplished something just by breathing the city's smelly air and drinking its excellent tap water.
Sasha's interviews and essays have also appeared in print in Violet Book, Parents, and Wilderness, and online at Mashable.com, Amy Poehler's Smart Girls, and beyond.