In birding circles, they say the first bird you see in a new year sets the tone for what follows. Anything can be meaningful ...

In 2024, you loved stories about music and religion, the color green and careful considerations of grief and hope, little ...

Nadia sat back on her heels, mentally retracing her steps between home and the molokhia field. She’d been so preoccupied with her freshly braided hair that she must’ve left it behind. She glanced out ...

Bring objects with their own relations into new relation, and so: make. To make an offering that brings things into relation. To make dinner as if dinner were to write a novel. To have dinner be the ...

Is America the greatest? It seems harder and harder to make the case for the country’s eminence, especially when you consider that, compared to a group of twenty advanced democracies, America now has: ...

THE FRAGRANCE of the forest is unlike any I have ever known. The smell of ripening and rotting apples and pears fills my nostrils. At my feet, russet reds, blushing pinks, vibrant roses, and creamy ...

ONCE I PAID ATTENTION TO IT, the plant appeared everywhere. Its foliage clouded our view of the river. Its vines tangled with my pumpkins, twisted around goldenrod, jewelweed, cow parsnip — in fact, ...

(This essay was a finalist for a 2010 National Magazine Award in the Essay category.) OUT ON THE BIG DRY we had to kill to live: Come October, we’d herd a yearling lamb into the west pen, throw it ...

I KNOW, COMING BACK AS A CROW IS A LOT MORE ATTRACTIVE. If crows and buzzards do the same rough job — picking, tearing, and cleaning up — who wouldn’t rather return as a shiny blue crow with a mind ...