An Unfinished Atlas

What do we learn about visions of cities when we consider writing and architecture as mutually defining?

A youthful obsession with Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother turns to frustration over how its subject, Florence Owens Thompson, an Indigenous woman, has been misperceived.

Bemidji, Minnesota, is a border town. Every place was, at one time or another, or perhaps is still, a border town. It depends on who you are and where you’re standing.

A mainstay of Los Angeles Chinatown, Won Kok Restaurant has become a gathering place for the city’s queers and Filipinos. Who and what activated this accidental ambience of belonging?

Ambitious literature and public policy each seek to shape reality. Few places embody the power of artists and policymakers to arrange space and time more persuasively than Washington, D.C.

What can you do with a closet-sized plot of overgrown land you didn’t know you’d inherited? In Hawai‘i, old laws that imposed private property continue to produce frictions and fictions of ownership and belonging.

Her name and likeness have served the mythology of American manifest destiny. What do we know of the emotional and intellectual presence of Sacagawea on the Lewis and Clark Trail?

In Chiapas, a Mayan textile tradition was disappearing until an artist helped local weavers relearn Indigenous methods. This is the crux and challenge of socially engaged creative practice.

Birding in Atlantic Beach, South Carolina, on the edge of Black history and Black what-might-yet-be.

In a militarized territory like Guam, everything is political, even cancer.

Sara Delano Roosevelt Park, the largest green space on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is neglected but vital — a place to dance, garden, haggle, gamble; to find one’s lost self.

The Chilcotin River in British Columbia has long divided — and joined — the Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in nations, each with an ancient claim to the land and its salmon run.

The Black diasporan tradition of geophagia, or dirt eating, has long been pathologized. Black writers and directors recover the practice as a sacred birthright.

That concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture. It’s a disappearing machine. We need to see it clearly.

In Texas and Lebanon, darkness is an ecological commons turned strategic military asset.

Lost among tangles of rhubarb, consumed by roots, thinking about how a precious, “uncivilized” drug made its way from ancient China to a backyard garden in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

What can plastic fragments found in an animal’s digestive tract tell us about the waters it has traversed?