Rain, Carson, Art, Salt: A Venetian Matrix
22 minutes
Early September 2024: When, on the morning of my third day in Venice, I wake and grab my phone to check the weather app, I am met by the same orange b...
Killing a Baboon: Applied History and the Anthropocene Ape
by Sandra Swart
36 minutes
#JusticeForRaygun is trending in South Africa. He was a young male baboon who had left his mother’s troop and set off, on a journey to adulthood. This...Cultures of Tarhana: A Tale of Humans and Microbes
18 minutes
The cultures of tarhana—a fermented instant soup base—come with a long-practiced culinary tradition in the Middle East and the Balkans. Although often...Stew of the Earth
11 minutes
Besides the leaves that a bag gathers, all you need for a cup of tea is hot water, and in the town of Furnas the earth boils it directly. I ...
The Magic Mirror: Legends, Limnology, and Nuclear Power on Lake Stechlin
by Jessica Lee
15 minutes
On the horizon of the small German village of Neuglobsow, the chimney of the Rheinsberg nuclear power plant rises above the surrounding beech and pine...The Poetics of Dunes
11 minutes
I grew up by the sea, in the warm south of Portugal, swimming in the ocean and playing in the sand. I didn’t know then that my childhood playground wa...Adventures in Mockstitutions
by Jenny Price
7 minutes
“If You Need to Use the Art” is an alt-institution public art project—or a mockstitution, to use artist Gregory Sholette’s moniker. These projects mim...Home, Roots, Cosmos: A Path through Calvino’s Ecology
15 minutes
The house is Villa Meridiana. You get there by going up a little side street that skirts Via Alessandro Volta, just outside the center of town. It’s u...Five Ways of Seeing the Steinsee
by Steve Mentz
7 minutes
On my last day as a Landhaus fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, with thin December light not quite thawing the snow, I abandoned packing to hike out ...Deadly Affairs: An Art Exhibition about Toxicity
14 minutes
Sometime in 2018 I joined a tour of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Guided by art historian Ingrid Greenfield, it highlighted the role of trade betwee...Yoruba Architectural Sites in Nigeria
14 minutes
Heritage preservation is the strategy of conserving the cultural and environmental history of a certain time and place, and it also has political, spi...Problematic Postage: Canada’s Claim to the Arctic through a Postage Stamp
by Daniel Dumas
7 minutes
Philatelic materials—postage stamps or documents related to postal history—are often overlooked in terms of their significance and impact on nation-bu...