J. Cavanaugh Simpson is a university lecturer, essayist, and a former staff writer for The Miami Herald among other publications. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Creative Nonfiction, The Connecticut Review, Utne Reader, WYPR's The Signal, as well as in the book collections Letters to J.D. Salinger (University of Wisconsin Press) and Signs of Life in the USA. (Bedford/St. Martin’s). As a foreign correspondent, she has written for such venues as The Baltimore Sun, reporting from Argentina, India, Cuba, and China. Cavanaugh Simpson earned her master's from The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars; her thesis, on Cuba's dissident journalists, was funded by Harvard University’s Goldsmith Research Award. She is a recipient of the 2015 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Arts Innovation Grant for "Fostering the Next Generation of Scientist Essayists." She is currently working on a book about the evolution of digital culture and counterculture, and can be reached at [email protected].
I have existed from the morning of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night –Roman emperor Gaius Caligula (AD 12–AD 41). Part of…