California as land’s end, world’s end: It collapses underneath the weight of such a reading, as it must. It reveals the limits of our history—demographic history, social history, history of technology, our sense of this place as final...
The scrutiny to which South Africa is incessantly exposed is a search for answers to two sets of questions. The questions are complex. Therefore the answers are complex and controversial. Even the choice of answers is constantly influenced...
As we look back upon the first and greatest ordeal of dismemberment suffered by the British Empire, we can see clearly enough from our vantage point how very acute George the Third was when he observed to Lord North in 1774: “The dye is now...
He was old when we met him first, the grizzled veteran of a thousand wars, literary and other, and standing then on the brink of his eightieth birthday. They said that he would celebrate the occasion quietly in Paris, taking the train from...
Father Johan climbed up first, and I hoisted his rifle and backpack up to him. The tower, a box on stilts, was walled with rugs and blankets strewn about, but the cold cut everything, including my oversized boots and borrowed wool socks. It...
Barrow, Alaska, is about as far from anywhere in North America as it’s possible to get: hard by the Beaufort Sea, 720 miles from Anchorage, 3,500 miles from Washington, DC, 1,100 miles from the North Pole. Yet, until very recently, it was...
