Orion Magazine

Leslie Jamison considers what it means to be in hospital, exploring the liminal spaces between sick and well.

Maybe the lighting feels particularly bright in my mind’s eye because I think of hospitals as places of ruthless visibility, where privacy is gone and the boundaries of the body become porous, where we see more than we’d like—about our bodies and their frailty, about where these bodies are always, ultimately, headed.

Nickole Brown reflects on how her inability to form memories as a result of childhood trauma had adversely affected her ability to survive.

Survival has to do with remembering what you most do not want to face. It has to do with not turning away, in believing your own testimony, in writing it down. Then, just like that, my memory was given back to me, whole and real, simply because she’d remembered it, because that’s what witnessing does.

“There is no hierarchy in the web of life.”

“A journey toward motherhood in the age of glacial loss.”

“And, formed as they are from durable polymers and loaded with toxic plasticizers and other chemicals, plastic gloves can last for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Yet in discarding them (or any plastic object, come to that), we act as if none of this touches us.”

“Large-scale resettlement due to rising sea levels is no longer a thought experiment, some hypothetical slow-motion calamity in the hazy future engulfing remote coastal villages. This is Mumbai and Shanghai. This is Piazza San Marco in Venice. This is Manhattan and Miami.” Zachary Slobig visits Gardi Sugdub, a community in the Guna Yala archipelago of Panama looking to relocate to the mainland.

On the trail of an elusive marine mammal.

What it’s like to teach evolution at the University of Kentucky.

How small communities like Red Hook in Brooklyn and Kansas City are addressing its lack of affordable broadband access.

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