A man and a lion once found a stone statue depicting an athlete strangling one of those giant cats. The man said, “We humans are the strongest creatures on earth!” The lion answered, “If we lions could sculpt, the statue would tell an...
They were the eighth plague visited upon Egypt: When Pharaoh refused to free the people of Israel, Exodus tells us, Moses stretched out his staff and a wind rose from the east, blowing hard for one day until a vast swarm of locusts arrived...
Richard is on his front porch smoking a cigarette; the rest of the street is deserted. From his chair you can see a round, white surveillance camera at the end of the block, craning from its mount on a telephone pole. Per capita, Lancaster...
This time, it begins after dark. There’s a solemnity that was absent from the previous day’s rituals, which I had witnessed when the sky was still light. “This time, we have to be serious. We can’t be jokey-jokey,” says Syafiq Dendi...
It’s Sunday morning in September and I’m walking Eighth Street when I see it: spray of words in green and pink, framed in the middle of the pavement as if an illustration of some kind. In the middle of the pavement?
The coast near Sea Ranch, a community in Sonoma County, California, has a kind of primordial majesty to it: a verdant shoreline where cliffs high and low drop into a rushing surf.
Is Mount Everest the tallest mountain on Earth? It would certainly seem to qualify. Chinese geographers tell us that it measures 29,017 feet, while Nepali geographers make it a skosh short of 29,029 feet. The National Geographic Society...
In Kabul’s largest cemetery, the weather is winter morning air. Jagged headstones fan up the mountainside with a view over a sprawling swampy lake. The Shuhada-e-Saliheen cemetery (the name means “pious martyrs”) is built near a crumbling...