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exploration
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Ghosts of Antarctica Will Haunt the End of the World
“One day, a white sheet is draped over the ocean, the next it has burst into a million pieces. A ghost, within a matter of days.” Jack Ryan beautifully weaves history, personal narrative, and science writing in this reported essay for CNET. He comments on our current climate crisis from a front-row seat at the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The End of Travel
“Driven by the need for a storied life, I relished the opportunity for endless travel. Is that a moment in time, now over?”
Posted inNonfiction
‘The Underland Is a Deeply Human Realm’: Getting Down with Robert Macfarlane
“I thought the underland would be — of all the landscape forms that have drawn me to explore them — the most uninhabited. This proved wildly incorrect.”
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story, Travel
A Three-Day Expedition To Walk Across Paris Entirely Underground
Journalist Will Hunt, who made the crossing with a group of urban explorers, recounts being menaced by rainwater and rats — and meeting fellow subterranean wanderers along the way.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Determined to Hitch a Ride on the Greatest Rig in America
An excerpt of The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica, about Billy Gawronski, a 17-year-old who was hell-bent on stowing away to Antarctica on Richard Evelyn Byrd’s 1928 expedition.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Here Be Dragons: Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World
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?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Year and a Day in a Mars Simulator: Reflections at the Halfway Mark
Sheyna Gifford, mission physician for NASA’s sMars simulation, reflects on her year-and-a-day “off-planet,” six months in.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The People Who Get Woken Up at 2am When Bob Ballard Finds Something on the Ocean Floor
73-year-old ocean explorer Bob Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic 30 years ago, and he hasn’t stopped exploring the ocean floor since. In a recent piece for Popular Mechanics, Ryan D’Agostino profiled Ballard and the research aboard his ship Nautilus (a 211-foot former East German research vessel that carries seventeen crew and thirty-one scientists and operations specialists). But what […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Travel, Foreignness, and the Spaces in Between: A Pico Iyer Reading List
Seven reads by Pico Iyer on travel and finding one’s place in the world.