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Lust for Science
Kelly Caldwell, Untitled. A researcher walks into a lab—and no, this isn’t the beginning of a joke in which you realize by the end that the researcher is not a man, but a woman. Remember the one about...
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No Country
Photo by Alan Light via Flickr. Licensed under CC. “That we are in the midst of a crisis is now well understood,” the new president had said earlier at the inauguration to nearly two million people in...
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Turning, Unfolding, Passing Through
Detail from Jan van Kessel II, Butterfly, Caterpillar, Moth, Insects, and Currants (1650-1655). The J. Paul Getty Museum. I went on a walk last March with my daughter, picking our way around spring’s...
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Artist in Residence
Manchester, 1962: Count Basie clowns around with Annie Ross as she shows him The Twist. Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix. When I was nineteen I shared an apartment in Manhattan with the jazz singer Annie...
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Coming into Bloom
Detail from Sergeĭ Mikhaĭlovich Prokudin-Gorskiĭ, Podsolnechnik (1910). The Library of Congress. They close the train platforms in France two minutes before departure. I learned this a minute too...
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What the Doctor Ordered
Detail from L.P. Vallée, [Interior of hospital with nuns] (1865-1875). Gift of Weston J. and Mary M. Naef. The J. Paul Getty Museum. Madison was never expected to live this long. The doctors had told...
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I and Thou: A Bigfoot Encounter
Still from the from the Patterson-Gimlin film, 1967. Wikimedia commons. I once bought a shirt at an outdoor market in New Orleans that I still wear pretty regularly. It’s red plaid flannel with a...
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The Ways We Take Ourselves Apart
Image source FUMIGRAPHIK_Photographist, via Flickr. I tilt my legs back and forth; draw my knees together, cross one leg over the other, my shorts pushed up on my thighs. I’m trying to catch the weak...
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World Without End
Photo by Sarah Altendorf via Flickr. Licensed under CC. On my first visit to my husband’s childhood home in Western Kentucky—after I got the tour of the house, the yard, and the garden—we paused on...
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Can’t Win
When the Saints won Super Bowl XLIV in 2010, I was in the backyard of my childhood home in New Orleans. My family lived in the town of Kenner, less the tourist-friendly picture of the city and more a...
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Beasts of the Fields
Thomas Mann Baynes, Running Rats. Fantascope manufactured in London, Great Britain, in 1833. Spring The rats appeared in late spring, when winter had yet to shake itself loose from our northern New...
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The Terrarium
Fogo Island, Newfoundland. Photograph by Douglas Sprott, Flickr “We are the teachers now,” Joshua Swift declares from the stage. Standing next to a poster board announcing that the EARTH IS FLAT, he...
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From Environmental Crisis to Pandemic, Waging a War with Nature
Image: Iurii Bakhmat, via Flickr. For the time being, the headlines have changed. The news of international conflict has been overtaken by an analysis of global existential threat, the sort of...
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Medusa and the Invention of Spells
Jaya Nicely You begin a spell with an invocation like Hear me or I beseech you or Oh friend or Listen. One of the things that can make a spell work is a description of a previous time the spell...
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The Optimist’s Apocalypse
Eadweard Muybridge, Animal locomotion. Plate 461, ca. 1887. More than once, I have almost blinked out of this world. One time I was railing lines of cocaine and didn’t feel like I was getting high...
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A Country on the Cusp of Change
Hwang Sok-young has been writing politically engaged fiction about contemporary South Korean life for fifty years. Only now, on a rising tide of appreciation for all things Korean—including the...
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Notes from a Hypochondriac
Photograph by Russ Allison Loar A month ago, give or take—before the lockdowns and soaring numbers—I developed a protocol for returning to my apartment. It isn’t foolproof, and it hasn’t quelled my...
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Ordinary Insanity
Photograph by Johannes Jander Jamie got pregnant immediately. She and her husband were delighted. “We didn’t think anything could go wrong.” Jamie pauses. “It”—the “it” being the possibility of a...
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Astrophotography and the Zeitgeist
Detail from Apollo 8: "Earthrise." Image courtesy of NASA. In December 1968, American nuclear engineer William Anders was 238,900 miles from home, aboard Apollo 8, the first crewed spacecraft to reach...
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The Pandemic Novelist Has Regrets
Still from La Jetée (1962) Last month, I rewatched Outbreak and Contagion. I was searching for the same scab-picking pleasure as everyone else who vaulted them to the Netflix Top 10. Instead, I caught...
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