‘We’re not interested in the welfare of individual animals here’

Also: the colors of home; the Great Salt Lake; the polar plunge; and more.

This month I went home for the first time since late April/early May 2019. Home is an old patchwork farmhouse in Kansas, on a dusty dirt road. I don’t live there anymore, obviously, although my books still line a walk-in closet on the second floor, and I keep a box of old clothes there so I have something to change into when I inevitably dump the conten…