The Trouble with Nature — Jenny in The New Yorker, online

A lot of people who live in the city like to visit the country to get close to nature. Then, once they are in the country, they find that they needn’t go outdoors to get close to nature. Nature comes right inside, as if to prove some kind of point.

Often, it arrives in the form of gray, nickel-size spiders that have woven their webs in the upper corners of several rooms, and then crawl up and down the walls to start a new web in another corner. Some people get a paper towel and clear away the webs and spiders, but many worry that the spiders will crawl onto their bodies, and so leave the webs and spiders alone, avoiding corners of rooms altogether. Read more.