The copper mine in Erdenet, Mongolia, provides jobs, income, opportunities. It finances most of the city’s infrastructure. It funds a hospital. People are grateful for the mine, and proud. There’s copper everywhere in Erdenet.
Sister Angela is wearing the softest robe I have ever touched. Her hearing aids are out and her dentures crunch as they settle. She is beaming at me from the dark, her face soft from sleep, her small body laundry-scented.
Under scrutiny: a pair of gates made of silver and iron, gilded with gold and embossed with patterns of flowers, birds, scrolls, and medallions portraying Biblical figures.
Traveling in Italy and Greenland in my teens and early twenties with a fitful and rudimentary cell phone, an impatience with the sweaty, masculine funk of internet cafés, and only the haziest notion of planning, I adored and relied on the...
A sheet of ground glass is useful for manual focusing in photography. With a ground-glass viewer inserted at the back of some large cameras, the image appears upside down, in vivid detail.
