How do you future-proof the present? How can you contextualize a specific moment? These are the questions that keep bubbling up when I meet with Helene Larsson Pousette and Robert Duffley in June of ...

AS THE WEATHER GETS WARMER each year, something unavoidable happens: the insects come back out. While some find the bugs ...

A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long ...

ONE WEEK IN HEAVEN THE CHINESE CHARACTER for silkworm (蚕) is composed of the symbol for sky (天) and the symbol for worm (虫). They are heavenly worms. China’s Sichuan Province, a damp, landlocked ...

PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within ...

A Culture of Tree People WOODY ENCROACHMENT into the American prairie is a product of modern realities, yes, but those realities were designed to the tastes of European colonizers who knew the ways of ...

I had always longed to meet an octopus. Now was my chance: senior aquarist Scott Dowd arranged an introduction. In a back room, he would open the top of Athena’s tank. If she consented, I could touch ...

IT WAS THROUGH THE GLASS SCREEN of my windshield that I first saw the people, residents of the city of Philadelphia, where I also live, who suffer from drug addictions so severe that they live, ...

ONE MORNING LAST JUNE as I sat with author David James Duncan on his deck overlooking Rattlesnake Creek, David pointed to a blur moving across the creek. A black bear cub. We watched the cub rummage ...

The Religion An amalgamation of West African/Nigerian Yoruba cosmology, Catholicism, and the nineteenth century French practice of spiritism, the complex Afro-Cuban religion Santería has been ...

Sometimes it’s disappointing to meet an artist you truly admire but meeting my fellow panelist Shaun Tan at the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2017 only fed my admiration. No one evokes the strangeness ...

STEP #2: STOP GENERALIZING. My instinct is to give Quammen the benefit of the doubt; it was the late ’80s after all. Regardless of his intentions though, Quammen’s notion that Canada geese offer ...