In the city where I live now, people do not like pigeons. They call them rats with wings. There are little metal spikes on the window ledges to keep them off, and a particular flick of the hand that people use to send them scattering off a café table. I understand it, I suppose. There are a great …

I fell in love with a breed of dog because of a film, which is an embarrassing sentence to write, and I am going to write it down anyway.

The film was Hachi, the one with Richard Gere, and it is the true-ish story of an Akita in Japan named Hachiko. The shape of it is simple and quietly devastating. …