So when I published an essay during the summer of Barbenheimer that braided my nuclear obsession with my past grief, ...

An interesting thing about your book is how you blend your role as a scientist with your role as a policymaker. You write about it not in a dry, college textbook-y way, but as a person, and as a ...

Birds began populating my own dreams. A great blue heron glided across the sky of my mind, slow and prehistoric, carrying the world on her back. A million sandhill cranes unspooled from the horizon, ...

MY BOSS AND I SIT in his extended cab, Dunkin’ coffee in big cupholders, and our only common interest: making furniture. We arrive in the Far Rockaways after spending five hours with nothing to talk ...

AFTER ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF of dating, Sam and I decided he should move into my house. We had each lived with partners before, but those moves had been swayed by financial stress and global ...

I’d like to say that my feet know the narrow dirt path better than they know my socks. The path leads through a birch grove floored with ferns to a cabin beside a stream. Inside the cabin I sit at a ...

I first encountered Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, in the ecology section of my local bookstore. For Orion's Summer 2025 issue, we're celebrating fungus in all forms! Join the ...

Introduction: Narratively speaking, environmental crises tend to fall into one of two classes. The first—call it type A—includes Love Canal, Bhopal, and DuPont’s mass production of forever chemicals.

Reflections on time, aging, and Monet's cataracts5. WATER LILIES AND LOTUS FLOWERS —the way they rise through the mud, opening into beautiful blooms—symbolize transcendence and rebirth. I read ...

IN OUR FREE TIME, WE DESTROY TREES. Hundreds of them by now. Five years ago, soon after I bought the place, I gave my partner a Husqvarna 450 Rancher for Christmas. Since then, he’s had to replace the ...

THE HISTORY OF the plastic carrier bag—the kind so often found caught on a tree branch and flagging in the wind—is a story of persuasion. But in the United States, the paper grocery bag proved far ...

AS PART OF HER tenure as the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and in association with the Library of Congress, Ada Limón commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to reflect on their place in the ...