EARLY IN 2004, a buoy was released into the waters off Argentina. Half of the buoy was dark and the other light, like a planet in relief. The buoy sailed east, accompanied by the vastness of the ocean ...

THE CHICKEN WAS UNWELL. She no longer ran to the summons of the leftovers pail to scratch at the compost heap with the other hens. Morning found her in a corner of the henhouse facing the wall, with ...

IT IS SPRING IN HOUSTON, which means that each day the temperature rises and so does the humidity. The bricks of my house sweat. In my yard the damp air condenses on the leaves of the crepe myrtle ...

AS PART OF HER tenure as the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and in association with the Library of Congress, Ada Limón commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to reflect on their place in the ...

THE HISTORY OF the plastic carrier bag—the kind so often found caught on a tree branch and flagging in the wind—is a story of persuasion. But in the United States, the paper grocery bag proved far ...

IN THE FALL OF 1941, as the Nazis invaded Russia, choking trade routes into Leningrad and starving the city’s population, a group of botanists decided to not allow the world to end. They were ...

THE MUSHROOM BURIAL SHROUD that covered Luke Perry’s face and famous forehead was black as night, or perhaps it was white as bone, made of organic cotton, and inlaid with white crochet tubes that ...

MAYBE IT’D BE a stand of trees encircling a ground soft with pine needles, out of view of neighbors so as not to scare them, but close enough that, should danger come, there might be a witness. That’s ...

“WHAT THE THIEF STOLE will always be expensive,” says Tāmati Kruger. He faces a large window in his tribe’s local marae, a community meeting house, as he speaks. His words are matter-of-fact. They ...

IN 1994, A NEWBORN vaquita porpoise was found tossing in a break in the Sea of Cortez, sixty miles south of the U.S. border. The man who found her wore black sunglasses and a gray shirt with ARIZONA ...

BEFORE THE APPOINTMENT, my sister slipped the doctor a note with a list of our concerns. Our dad was forgetting words, wasn’t walking well, had difficulty communicating, was struggling to use ...

I took to the English language as a duck takes to water. At length: the Marianne Islands. Here original habits mingle with the austere, superstitious manners of Spaniards. The bottom is good, the ...