VQR

After a heart attack (perhaps two heart attacks), Jeff Sharlet searches for meaning in his own mortality, “This brilliant darkness, with which I am coming to terms.”

“[N]owhere in this region is the contrast between the contemporary and the ancient higher than in Kazakhstan. And nowhere is the interplay between the two more starkly embodied than in professional Kazakh kokpar.”

In the aftermath of disaster, as new communities thousands-strong coalesce in the countryside around Port-au-Prince, Haitians ask: what makes a city?

Maps are how we orient ourselves, and how we donate a place’s value — and by extension, the value of that place’s inhabitance. What does that means for the place still left un-mapped?

One New Orleans man reflects on the many unflattering racial layers of life of his city. “There are four of us. Four African Americans out of 280. One from a class of the early eighties. Two from the nineties. And me representing the 2000s.”

San Salvador’s upstart mayor, Nayib Bukele, has promised a new way forward for a city besieged by decades of violence. His biggest obstacle, however, may not be the city’s gangs, but the city’s idea of itself.

Thousands of us live and work with companion or service animals — but is it morally acceptable to be breeding animals for human use at all?

On the efforts to preserve darkness, a fast-disappearing element in America’s heavily light-polluted skies.

A suicide survivor, the five-figure medical debt that followed her out of the hospital, and her own experience in patient care and hospital billing. What costs are actually necessary?

When a husband and wife try to disappear to escape a stalking ex and start a new life with their kids, books help them learn to live out in the open.