Glimpses of humanity in an unlikely corner of the internet.
exploration
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Ghosts of Antarctica Will Haunt the End of the World
“As climate change threatens to upend the icy kingdom, we’re writing ghost stories in real time.”
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.