A desert, by definition, is an inherently vacuous thing. It is characterized by absence, so much so that we even have a word for the fantastical and almost certainly not-real images it drives us to see. Had you gotten hypothetically lost for a few days in the South African desert of Tankwa Karoo, the extreme …
The desire to escape grounds itself in many of us, but it laid roots early in Andrew Solomon. As a Jewish child hearing stories of the Holocaust and obsessing over British fairy tales, Solomon prepared for his opportunity to get out. In his essay “Dispatches from Everywhere,” Solomon writes: I was afraid of the world. …
Scientists should be futurists. If we don’t understand flowing wells, then what chance do we have for a future? At the end of July, I stood among a cluster of Sustainable Agriculture students from Iowa State University under a gazebo in Eagle Grove, Iowa staring at an elbow-bent pipe sprouting from the cement foundation. We were …