Adrift in Sunlit Night

… backbiting civil servants whose only task, when they weren’t drafting mindless reports or copying them forever again, was to spend their hours groveling and gossiping and feeding off each other’s blighted lives. Call this paleo-travel: searching for what’s underneath, or for what’s no longer quite there.
I want to see …

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Our Feathered Friends

The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think by Jennifer Ackerman; Penguin Press, 368 pp., $28
Gabrielle Nevitt grew up enthralled with birds. Not just the birds at the feeder or in the woods near her home. She knew birds intimately—because they lived with her in her …

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Summer 2020

… obviously put out. ‘No,’ Cage replied, ‘I think there’s just the right amount.’
—Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms, 1999

The cats and houseplants are his to feed and water
and the sunflower blooming in the driveway’s border
of weeds. He drew our backyard to scale,
using map symbols, sent off to have it …

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Western Sahara: A Fragile Peace

… territory, making it impossible to cross. No sea, no agriculture, no roads, no cell networks, no Internet. Sahrawis liked to come here for the rainy season, leaving the confined feeling of the camps to enjoy the cool, fresh air and feed their herds. “Here we have green pastures and the purest camel milk to live

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Reading Together, Alone

… Society.
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Cræft in the Time of Corona

… edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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Spy Games and Secrets

… edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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Farm to Fable

… to prove that commercial farms didn’t have to rely on single crops or kowtow to the agricultural-industrial complex that had taken over the job of feeding the country. He promoted soil conservation, crop rotation, no-till agriculture, and other practices that would later become common among sustainable and organic advocates.
He called the …

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Trouble Brewing

… edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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Tropical Troublemakers

… edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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