This roundtable on description in the novel took place on May 3, 2016, at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Concluding the inaugural year of the Novel Theory Seminar, the ...
Tag: Landscape
Virtual Roundtable on
Design Against Disaster
What is to be done? We are the hapless victims of rising temperatures and tides, droughts and superstorms. Infrastructure buckles and the water is full of lead. Of course all urban ecological ...
Talk about the Weather
In his series of black-and-white images, Bad Weather (1980), English photographer Martin Parr captured some recognizably damp, gray scenes.
Walking the Venetian: Miami, FL
To get to Publix for supplies, walk east on the pink sidewalk of Venetian Way, which links five man-made islands between Miami and Miami Beach. Biscayne Bay glitters green ...
The Church House on Cannaday School Road: Floyd, VA
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Floyd, VA, sits at the intersection of State Highway 221 and Route 8, in the southwest ...
Urban Park Poetics: Summer in Marcus Garvey Park
For city dwellers, summer is park season. Warm weather draws people out of their homes, onto the streets, and, if they’re lucky, into a nearby park to enjoy recreation of all kinds (eating, napping ...
Backpacking Across “Stand Your Ground” Territory
The young man’s travel tale is a stalwart of American publishing. There’s the very famous story of two boys on the Mississippi, the Beat novel about road-tripping written on a giant spool of paper ...
John Williams’s Perfect Anti-Western
Canyonlands National Park, Utah; 103ºF under a cloudless summer sky. I’d call the canyon floor below “bone-white,” if it looked like anything had ever lived there long enough to leave its bones ...
Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this ...
The Bonds of the Sea
What do war journalism and surfing have in common? On the face of it, not much: surfing is a frivolous pastime and war reporting a humanitarian endeavor to shine a light on violent conflict in ways ...
What to Do If Yer Bit By a Snake
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on ...
A Bus Ride in Old Mexico
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on ...
The Price of Great Art
When someone who made good art is accused of being a Bad Mother, can she ever be remembered as anything but a Bad Mother? In 1992, Mann’s book Immediate Family tapped into collective anxiety ...
Unstill Life
English nature writing has never been all that natural. While their American counterparts tend to imagine natural landscapes as “the last remaining place where civilization … has not fully infected ...
Yorkshire Calling: An Interview with Caryl Phillips
Caryl Phillips is a British writer, born in St. Kitts. He has authored and edited a wide range of works, including plays, screenplays, documentaries, and non-fiction. His novels, with geographies ...
Saguaro Sketchbook
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on ...
Street Corner Society
The world thinks it knows Manhattan. A thousand movie portrayals, among them Woody Allen’s classic Manhattan, and TV shows like Sex and the City have imprinted its iconic skyscrapers on our ...
The Market and the Fest
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In the rural villages of southern Germany, the rain rolls in breakers down the hills ...
In the Yellowstone Valley, a Beet Farmer with an Artist’s Soul
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Montana Avenue in Billings is a startlingly urban raft on the vast, grassy sea of ...