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 ...

TO BUILD LASTING FURNITURE requires that I tap into this connection to the animal. It would be easy to imagine the body as a machine. The motions of building are repetitive—pulling a handsaw through ...

MY CONVERSATION WITH ARTURO would happen after I returned home, but on the last weekend of my Oregon trip, I buckled into Joe’s gray Toyota Tacoma truck as he drove us out to Mount Pisgah Arboretum.

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN eating mushrooms for at least twelve thousand years, according to the fungal micro-remains found in Paleolithic dental samples in a mountain cave in Eastern Spain. Yet the idea of ...

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 ...

JO: I sometimes feel that in an individualistic culture, people get freaked out by the idea of being tied down or responsible for anything. Thinking about a gift economy, they might say, “I want the ...

On poetry, translation, and lossAS: Tell me more. IN: Well, my sister Becca isn’t mentioned in the poem “ Still Life with Invisible Canoe ” but a conversation with her about the imagined river in that ...

Reflections on time, aging, and Monet's cataracts5. WATER LILIES AND LOTUS FLOWERS —the way they rise through the mud, opening into beautiful blooms—symbolize transcendence and rebirth. I read ...

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. For over a century, the paper bag held dominion over how ...

SHIFTING BASELINES is the idea that each successive generation will accept as “normal” an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a ...

S. AND I SIT ON A LOG on a San Pancho beach of western Mexico’s Nayarit coast, watching. Soon, we’ve been told, there will be a release of sea turtles, but we don’t know quite where, so we observe the ...