. . . WOULD BEGIN WITH an image so startling and lovely and wondrous that you would stop riffling through the rest of the mail, take your jacket off, sit down at the table, adjust your spectacles, ...

DEEP IN THE FORESTS of the southern coastal plains are places where trees rise up straight out of the ground, sometimes one hundred feet, their branches splayed all near the crown in a wide, high ...

“The mushroom pushes against boundaries,” writes Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “and in doing so, it creates an opening.” So often, when humans look at mushrooms, we’re apt to see solutions—a cure, a trip, a ...

BIGFOOT ISN’T REAL, but black bears are—that’s the subtext of a recent study by Dr. Floe Foxon mapping bear populations relative to cryptid sightings. That study, published in 2024, sparked my ...

IN THE FALL OF 1941, as the Nazis invaded Russia, choking trade routes into Leningrad and starving the city’s population, a group of botanists decided to not allow the world to end. They were ...

A CATFISH WITH THREE EYES lived in the Gowanus Canal. I can say this with confidence because I have seen the evidence. The catfish was shiny and pitch-dark. After a fisherman hooked it and reeled it ...

I ONCE THOUGHT I KNEW what nature writing was: the pretty, sublime stuff minus the parking lot. The mountain majesty and the soaring eagle and the ancient forest without the human footprint, the ...

AFEW YEARS AGO, while living on the Diné Nation, I first heard a striking proclamation that rang through the community with profound urgency: “Tó éí íín´á!”—“water is life.” I saw these words in bold ...

PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within ...

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of technology indistinguishable from magic, especially in the realm of thinking machines. Among other tasks, you can ask ChatGPT, one of the world’s most advanced deep-learning ...

Meera Subramanian: Genesis in the Bible is one of the mothers of origin stories. Your book transforms the text in a really ...

THOREAU WAS EMPHATIC ABOUT THE HUCKLEBERRIES. In one of his two most famous pieces of writing, “Civil Disobedience,” he concluded his account of a night in Concord’s jail with, “I was put in jail as I ...