Podcast The Book of Yerba Mate October 17, 2024 Brewed from the dried leaves and tender shoots of an evergreen tree native to South America, yerba mate gives its drinkers the jolt of liquid effervescence many of us get from coffee or tea. Read More
Essay The right way to drink yerba mate September 18, 2024 The first time someone from North America tries yerba mate in the traditional style, with a gourd or cattle horn stuffed with smokey green leaves and the metal drinking straw, we often break one of the unwritten rules of the South American drink. Read More
Essay Matsutake as world-makers January 10, 2024 What a Mushroom Lives For takes us beyond the animal realm to explore a place barely known to most people, the inner realm of fungi and how they participate in making the world around them via their relations to microbes, other fungi, plants, and animals. Read More
Essay Emotional creatures and the cultivation of mental health August 21, 2023 In Britain and America, mental health is increasingly thought of as a transversal issue, as important for psychologists as for patients, probation workers as for prisoners, politicians as for constituents. Read More
Interview Spotlight on Supporting Diverse Voices: Cara Ocobock July 31, 2023 In this Author Q&A, we highlight the work of Dr. Cara Ocobock, Supporting Diverse Voices grantee and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Notre Dame. Read More
Essay A look inside Running Out December 22, 2022 On the high plains of western Kansas, there is no clear line between water and second chances. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was in search of both when I turned my Prius off a two-lane highway and onto the washboard gravel that led back to the farm. Read More
Essay Welcome to Armageddon July 19, 2022 Each day throughout the year, the tour buses begin arriving at Megiddo soon after 9:00 a.m., disgorging fifty tourists at a time. By the time the site closes at 5:00 p.m., several dozen buses will have deposited hundreds of visitors. “Welcome to Armageddon,” the tour guides say, as they march their flocks up the steep incline and through the ancient city gate. Read More
Essay Acquiring a horizon June 27, 2022 Expectations about the environment and how it should act are being undone. In an idealized world, scientific projections hold; natural disasters can be contained; and knowledge, assumed to be cumulative, can be relied upon to maintain some semblance of predictability. Read More
Essay Exploring London’s past through mudlarking May 24, 2022 For millennia, objects have found their way into the River Thames as it flows through London. Household rubbish has been dumped into it, personal possessions accidentally lost, cargoes spilt, offerings made to gods, and coins tossed in for luck. Read More
Interview Book Club Pick: The Mushroom at the End of the World April 01, 2022 Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the Northern Hemisphere. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s account of these sought-after fungi offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: What manages to live in the ruins we have made? Read More
Podcast American Shtetl February 17, 2022 Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. Read More
Interview Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers on American Shtetl February 10, 2022 Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. Read More
Podcast Listen in: American Afterlives November 22, 2021 Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Running Out November 15, 2021 The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. Read More
Interview Shannon Lee Dawdy on American Afterlives October 25, 2021 Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Read More
