Every Republican senator voted for the resolution, including South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, as did a few Democrats, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The bill’s sponsor said the bat’s “endangered” status would put an undue burden on the East Coast’s timber industry.

The rule found support in the U.S. House and among developers. Rock Hill-based Republican Ralph Norman, a successful developer himself, has benefited from forest clear-cutting to build large commercial warehouses. Norman suggested that the Endangered Species Act shouldn’t apply to all animals. And certainly not these bats.

“I see the bald eagle. That makes sense. I see the bears. That makes sense. But long-eared bats? I hope the white-nose syndrome wipes all of them out. We won’t have it to worry about,” Norman said at a committee hearing before a critical vote.

After a stint at the North Carolina Heritage Program, the state’s primary biodiversity agency, she landed at the Fish and Wildlife Service in DC in 2004. There, she focused on convincing private landowners to voluntarily take up conservation measures for all types of threatened critters, including longleaf pine species like the red-cockaded woodpecker. When she retired in 2019, she left feeling like the agency failed to understand and serve people on a local level. So, after settling down in Raleigh, she founded Venus Flytrap Champions, knowing full well that public support of a key charismatic species can help save whole ecosystems. Now she treks up and down the coast, trying to convince people to safeguard flytraps and, in some cases, digging them up to relocate them. Think of her as Susan Orlean’s orchid thief but for rescuing, not stealing, plants.

LM: In the mid-1990s, when you were starting to work on this, was there a lot of doubt that homosexuality takes place in the natural world? Was there a sense that this was something people were aware of, or did it feel new even to be bringing it out?

JM: It felt new. It was something that I was not aware of and had not really considered before, so I was personally fascinated by the subject.

All these things that are compiled in here were the notes and observations of scientists. For years they’ve been seeing this stuff, but usually just in side notes. And they published very little about these subjects. This is the one publication that pulled everything together into a single document.

LM: That’s interesting. It’s taking the side notes and the things that were listed as deviant or abnormal and saying, Wait, when you actually put them all together, maybe they’re not.

Do you remember any drawings, or the journeys to a drawing, that were funny or hard or complicated?

JM: Well, a fun one for me was the hand signals by chimpanzees. We spent quite a bit of time working on this illustration. We actually studied the symbols that they use in sign language publications.

LM: There’s a sideways wave and there’s one that almost looks like you’re dribbling a basketball, which is apparently an invitation for sexual interaction. There are ones that seem to be telling the partner what to do: turn around, position yourself, spread your legs. Were you watching videos? How did you get so precise with these? It’s so cool. It’s like a language—like sex talk.

JM: Bruce basically gave me rough sketches of what he wanted on these. And so I had a rough idea of how to go about this. And then I think I asked my wife, Anne, to move her hand about in various ways, and then I turned her hand into a chimpanzee hand.

To anyone who lives south of the Arctic Circle the problem can seem abstract—another distant note of sadness in an era heavy with extinctions. But this is not how it appears in the far north.

In small communities scattered along the tree line or set in the open tundra, towns such as Anaktuvuk Pass that are often isolated, often Indigenous, where imported food and gas can be astronomically expensive and hunting caribou is often the cheapest and fastest and certainly the most satisfying way to provide for a family, the decline brings a peculiar dread. An Inupiat elder in a coastal town told me it was like feeling the symptoms of a cold coming on. The cold arrives, and it lingers. You don’t get over it. Then it worsens, until you become gaunt and haunted, until you’re afraid it isn’t a cold at all but something deeper. Something that’s shot through your whole system.

This is how the caribou problem feels to many Native people in the north, including the Nunamiut. Their name means “people of the land,” but anyone will tell you that they are, most of all, a caribou people. They are also sometimes called America’s last nomads, because only in about 1950 did the Nunamiut give up a mobile life, a life spent hunting and following caribou. They chose to settle in Anaktuvuk Pass exactly because the herd poured through it like a river. The name Anaktuvuk means “the place of many caribou droppings.”

One night after I’d gone out hunting with Clyde Morry, his father, Mark, made a quiet comment about the choice his people had made. Mark Morry was a veteran of the Vietnam War. Thick gray hair, thick old glasses. He sat in a recliner by a window in the house he had built, watching his family eat caribou that Clyde had brought home.

“It was a big gamble for them to settle down like that,” Mark said of his own father and mother and uncles and aunts, the generation who gave up nomadism. “They figured the caribou would always be here.”

*This story is only accessible to National Geographic subscribers.

Micro-scale real estate. Marvelous birds with better memory than yours. Neighbors recording neighbors. Love among seniors. A profile of a woman who’s been both ubiquitous and anonymous for 15 years. All that—and more!—in this week’s edition.

1. Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Miniatures

Scott Huler | Esquire | November 20, 2023 | 5,653 words

In summer 2020, I ordered a miniature house kit, thinking it would be the first of many cute dioramas I’d construct while stuck at home. As I write this, however, I glance over at the unopened box, a bit embarrassed that I have yet to experience the joy of making it. For Esquire, Scott Huler immerses himself in the world of working miniaturists, and a movement that exploded during lockdown and grew even more popular thanks to Instagram and TikTok. Speaking with collectors and artists, such as professional miniaturist Robert Off, Huler explores the why behind this art. What makes a roombox—the boxed display that houses a miniature 3D environment—so irresistible? I love what Huler discovers: for many miniature makers and viewers, a roombox provides a way to focus, a place of relief. An entire world in which to escape, or to control. An outlet to imagine and dream that “just offstage, there’s more going on if you could just get small enough to walk through that little doorway.” This piece brought me joy, not just because I was wowed by the skilled craftsmanship of miniaturists working today, but it also reminded me of the peace we can find within our interior world, and the power of our own imagination. —CLR

2. Last Love: A Romance in a Care Home

Sophie Elmhirst | The Guardian | November 23, 2023 | 4,036 words

I had to take a moment after reading this essay to sit and untangle the mess of feelings it brought up. It’s joyful, desperately sad, and a poignant reflection on aging: a standout piece. Sophie Elmhirst introduces us to two lovers, Mary and Derek. Theirs is teenage love, pure and easy, with no responsibility to weigh it down. But Mary and Derek are no teenagers; their meet-cute is in a care home. With just a few choice words, Elmhirst brings their characters to life, mixing their love story with memories to remind us of what came before a life of inconveniences and incontinence pads. She uses short, crisp sentences, jumping from place to place and emulating the way fragments of memory come bright and clear before fading and falling out of reach. It was as if I was sitting with Mary, listening as she grasped for a memory before finding another. In a few paragraphs, we have a snapshot of two lives, swinging from love to tragedy, the way life can—a history that makes the love story even more beautiful. “It’s different, meeting someone late in life,” Elmhirst explains. “You know you won’t have long, so the love feels more urgent.” (Even if this leads to awkward noises from the home’s bedrooms.) When the love is lost, it hits with a jolt, and Mary is shocked into facing the truth that she will never go home again. Yet, her final pragmatism is inspiring. An essay that made me think about aging in a way I never have before. —CW

3. How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

Lauren Smiley | WIRED | November 7, 2023 | 7,704 words

Last April, law enforcement in San Francisco’s Marina District responded to 911 calls about an unhoused man who was beating a local resident with a metal object. The suspect was quickly arrested and the story soon went viral, in no small part because there was a video of the incident. But there were other videos—as Lauren Smiley writes, “In San Francisco, there’s always another video”—and in time they revealed there was more to the story, particularly as it pertained to the supposed victim. I don’t want to give the rest away, because this feature should be read in its entirety. It’s a masterful retelling of events, certainly, but it’s also a razor-sharp, much-needed analysis of the way San Franciscans now police one another via cell phone videos, Ring cameras, and other devices. This citizen surveillance, as Smiley shows, is feeding the national narrative about San Francisco as a place of squalor and violence. Tape something on your doorstep and before long, “the cops get it, the footage gets passed to the prosecutor, who hands it to the defense attorney, who tosses it like chum to the ravenous media, and before you know it, your house cam is on CNN, it’s playing on All In with Chris Hayes, it’s making rhetorical points against Tucker Carlson, it’s basically a live birth on a San Francisco sidewalk, boomeranging the eyes right back on you, threatening to put you on the witness stand, sending a WIRED reporter marching up to your garage on a Friday afternoon, hoping to talk.” —SD

4. The Naturalist and the Wonderful, Lovable, So Good, Very Bold Jay

Brian Payton | Hakai Magazine | November 14, 2023 | 3,700 words

First, let us have a moment of appreciation for this banger of a headline, in tribute to Judith Viorst’s classic childhood read, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I was powerless to resist this piece and was well rewarded for my time. Brian Payton’s Hakai story about the winged wizard known as the Canada jay is satisfying beginning to end. This is no paltry plumed profile; Payton weaves fact, anecdote, and story together so deftly that these 3,700 words evaporate before your very eyes. I could have read a story double the length and still would have wanted more. You’ll meet 81-year old Dan Strickland, a naturalist who is the world’s foremost authority on the bird species, his knowledge gained from decades spent observing and interacting with the cunning corvids in the boreal and subalpine forests where they make their home. “Our prodigious brains can store vast amounts of information,” writes Payton. “London cab drivers, for example, must memorize the Knowledge, a set of famously grueling exams covering the location of 25,000 city streets. Not bad, but a Canada jay can cache up to 1,000 food items per day—then remember and retrieve upward of 100,000 of them over the course of a season.” Not only is this story about a jay a real joy, it’s a rare treasure that reminds me of why I fell in love with reading in the first place: learning about those with such deep interests is deeply interesting. —KS

5. Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?

Caity Weaver | The New York Times Magazine | November 25, 2023 | 4,690 words

I always feel just a twinge of guilt recommending a story that has already become The Thing Everybody Read This Week. In my defense, though, I read the story before This Week had even officially begun, and immediately knew that it would be my Top 5 pick. Also in my defense, the first line is perfect. “One needn’t eat Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles to survive; advertising’s object is to muddle this truth.” Why is this perfect? Well, because it tells you everything you need to know about what the story will be about, and what this story will be. It will be funny (as Caity Weaver’s profiles always are). It will be clear-eyed. It will be armed with some well-earned cynicism about how companies—or, rather, their vaporous and often uncanny incarnations known as “brands”—operate. The one thing this sentence doesn’t quite prepare you for is how generous the story is. How generous its subject is. And how generously you might think about things thereafter. We all have aspirations. Sometimes our life realizes those aspirations, sometimes it doesn’t. But sometimes even when it doesn’t, it does. Stephanie Courtney, the comic actor once bent on getting to Saturday Night Live and now in firm possession of a far more fulfilling gig, knows that better than anyone. —PR

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!

Every year, the monitors collect around 7,000 birds, doubtless a tiny fraction of the unknowable number that die every year. Some days the work is constant: One recent October morning, the Monitors scooped up around a thousand birds at McCormick Place, a convention center abutting Lake Michigan whose massive glass façade makes it a particularly egregious hotspot. Prince joked that the volunteers measured their busyness in Valium gulped. “People call and say, hey, is there some kind of disease outbreak going around?” she said wryly. “No, it’s just architectural design.”

In Nuttall’s day, glass was comparatively rare: windows tended to be small and set within brick or granite. Today it’s everywhere—particularly in Chicago, longtime home of the mid-century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose preference for vast glass facades still influences the city’s aesthetic. van der Rohe’s purpose, he once said, was to fuse nature, humans, and structures in a “higher unity.” The virtue of glass was that it connected indoor spaces with outdoor ones. The irony is awful: We prize a material that kills birds because it makes us feel closer to nature.

After you’ve known a place for a while, you can see one season in another. It’s not mystical or even that hard. I find it reassuring, or at least it was reassuring. These comings and goings of birds and other animals feel like rituals, but that is not really an accurate description since they are the thing itself, not a reenactment, their lives depending on getting the timing right. These timetables have been fine-tuned over millions of years. In the cocoons of our virtual and electronic worlds, it is easy to ignore these primal timetables, but we lose something when we do.

My life in Pakistan, full of painful nothing, had left a flat landscape inside my head. Not a bleak, dead one. That would almost have been easier. This flat landscape seared with painful livingness. It wouldn’t let me look away: kept me mesmerised by its agonised, intense emptiness. And it seemed more real than any of the strange world around me. Even in safe cosy Britain, where there were consequences for hurting your children and education was free, I sensed something sinister under the gleaming surface. Something stark and painful, and utterly relentless that refused to know how much its wealth and serenity was built on the pain of others, stripped for parts by white colonisers and taught to hate themselves.

From those flat places, drained and bare and empty, and which hid nothing – which, like me, couldn’t stop showing their damage – there rose up stories of more migrants from Asia and Africa. Not birds, this time, but cockle-pickers, farm-workers, a human zoo, a labour battalion. Migrants whom Britain does not know how to see; whom it prefers not to see. I wrote about these walks in my book, A Flat Place (2023). I put the flat place inside me on to paper, made it into a solid flat rectangle bound between boards, so that it didn’t need to surge up under my eyes any longer. I could show it to friends who loved me.

On the floor, a cow’s head resembles a Halloween mask, horns up, eye sockets facing the door, snout resting close to what looks like a rusted engine. Half the head is bone, half is covered with hide and keratin. Femurs and ribs and backbone scatter the floor, amid bits and bobs of machinery. One day, for reasons unknown, this cow wedged herself into an old shed and died.

Cattle loom large in death, their bodies lingering. Their suffering—whether or not by human hands—is tangible. Through size, domestication, and ubiquity, they take up a disproportionate amount of space physically, and through anthropomorphism, they grab a disproportionate amount of human imagination and emotion. When Frank Murkowski said Alaska should leave one island to the cattle, he probably pictured a happy herd rambling a vast, unfenced pasture—not an island full of bones or heifer-buckling bulls.

They thought it best to leave town for a bit, and they asked Haley where she wanted to go. Her favorite thing she had ever seen in her short life was the Gateway Arch, which they’d visited on a family vacation, so they decided to take a short trip to St. Louis. During the drive up, Haley told them for the first time—told anyone for the first time—about her “imaginary friend,” Alecia.

From the moment Alecia first appeared in the story, Haley insisted on that slightly unorthodox spelling, although she did not yet perfectly know how to read. She also insisted on other specific details. Alecia was four years old. She had long, dark hair tied in pigtails. She wore a red shirt with purple sleeves, bell-bottom pants, and white sneakers. She had a flashlight. She guided Haley to the river.

“I never had imaginary friends before this experience,” Haley told me, “and I never had any after. And I never saw this particular imaginary friend again.” She did not think at any time that Alecia was a real child. “I was fully aware that this was a non-corporeal being that was with me. And she was a little girl, and we had conversations, we told stories, we played patty-cake, and she was just a very comforting presence. But I knew I was alone.” The hallucinations started later, after she’d already made it to the river. Alecia was not a vision of this sort. “I one hundred percent did not think there was another child with me. I knew, physically, I was alone.” But she also says that Alecia guided her to the river, which she didn’t know was there.

There is a phenomenon called third man syndrome, or third man factor: when some sort of unseen or incorporeal conscious presence seems to accompany people—often a person alone—going through a long, difficult, and frightening experience they do not know they will survive. It is not well understood. It may be some sort of emergency coping mechanism. It was most famously experienced by Sir Ernest Shackleton during one of his expeditions to the Antarctic; the mountaineer Reinhold Messner has also reported experiencing the phenomenon, as have the explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft. “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,” Shackleton wrote in his 1919 memoir, South, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”