Lydia Horne

3 weeks ago | altaonline.com | Lydia Horne

The act of writing burns about a calorie a minute. Fingers flex and extend across the keyboard. Biceps curl to reach across the desk. Your trapezius collaborates with nearby neck muscles to hold up your head. In On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters, author Bonnie Tsui proves the parallel between writing and physicality, wrestling themes related to the body’s fibrous strands into five chapters, on strength, form, action, flexibility, and endurance.

4 weeks ago | altaonline.com | Lydia Horne

White cardboard boxes towered over Dennis Bell’s head. Photo negatives, some coated with footprints and dog hair, covered the floor and reels of 16-millimeter film stacked precariously on top of a washing machine.

Jan 14, 2025 | altaonline.com | Lydia Horne

“Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.” —Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower On Thursday morning, Octavia’s Bookshelf owner Nikki High arrived at her Pasadena store to discover something unusual: power.

Aug 29, 2024 | altaonline.com | Lydia Horne

In 2017, Amy Slonaker was told she had two years to live. Slonaker, then 45 years old, was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast-to-bone cancer. Head spinning from the prognosis, the Brooklyn lawyer quit her Wall Street job and moved home to Santa Barbara, where she enrolled in a mythological-studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Jan 17, 2024 | marieclaire.com | Lydia Horne

When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in my 20s, I rented a room from a couple in a two-bedroom apartment. The space had big windows, purple walls, and soft pink carpets. On the other end of the apartment lived Tracy* and Andy. They were practically a cliche: both worked in tech, loved silent discos, and hung with a Burning Man crowd. They were also in their early 50s, and used my rent to subsidize a rental home on the California coast, where they enjoyed spending time.