What happens when we talk to animals?W hen the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a ...

On Annie Ernaux’s spectacular impersonalityDiscussed in this essay: A Girl’s Story, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer. Seven Stories Press. 160 pages. $18.95. A Man’s Place, by Annie ...

How forests adapt to climate changeN inety minutes west of Boston, up the road from a Benedictine monastery, lies what is perhaps the most studied forest on Earth. Since 1907, when the first of these ...

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On Elizabeth McCracken’s irreducible fictionDiscussed in this essay: The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken. Ecco. 224 pages. $26.99 I n 1996, upon my arrival in the United States, I attended a ...

Discussed in this essay: Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen. Liveright. 576 pages. $40. I n the 1630s, the powerful Pequot Confederacy of southern New ...

“F ar as the east from even, / Dim as the border star, / Life is the little creature / That carries the great cigar.” So wrote Emily Dickinson, with some unfortunate help from a computer. As I read ...

Discussed in this essay: On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger, translated from the German by Tess Lewis. New York Review Books. 144 pages. $14.95. E rnst Jünger is the intractable land mine of German ...

The mysteries of firefly synchronyT he firefly pioneers of the twentieth century were Elisabeth and John Buck, a married couple who began methodically studying fireflies and theorizing about ...

I n 1943, after being interrogated by Vichy police officers who suspected him (rightly) of conspiring to rescue Jews from the occupying Nazis, a French clergyman named André Trocmé stepped into the ...

How coaches get in athletes’ headsA t the 2003 World Figure Skating Championships, Tim Goebel stood by the ice just before his long program. At the time, people called him the Quad King. In figure ...

F or a long time, Elizabeth wasn’t interested in the sensory workshop. She flatly refused to attend. Lauren, who has worked at Cherry Road for eight years, kept up the invitations anyway—just a ...