‘Sam’ in Rīga, Latvia

You’re not going to find jello cups on the menu at Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, Alaska. Instead, patients and visitors choose between reindeer pot pie, smoked hooligan, birch sourdough biscuits with fireweed jelly, herring roe, salmon-belly or seal soup, and Eskimo ice cream (made with animal fat, fish oil, and berries). Depending on…

The word “timely” has gotten a hell of a workout over the last several years. That’s what comes of living on a knife’s-blade moment in history. We balance, teetering, on a thin slip of stability, diamond-sharp and diamond-precious. At such times, stories cannot help but take on new resonance. Yet in this moment, in which…

Some folks don’t have a choice. Jeff Cronenweth sprung from cinema. His dad, Jordan Cronenweth, shot Blade Runner, Stop Making Sense, and the best bits of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. From roaming his father’s sets, the younger Cronenweth absorbed his hunger for the lens. He crawled through crews, starting as a loader and…

Andersonville is now a sleepy little town in southern Georgia. But during the Civil War, it was the site of the notorious Camp Sumter Prison. Here, thousands of captured Union soldiers perished, often from the miserable conditions. Today, the National Park Service maintains the National POW Museum where the prison once stood. Read moreA Guide to…

When the Wainwright State Office Building was completed in 1891, it towered ten floors over the city of St. Louis and won the praise of critics and passersby alike. The exterior of the building is composed of terra cotta. The design was the brainchild of  Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho…

On September 20, the sun began to rise at the South Pole. It took 30 hours for the sun’s disk to clear the horizon, and weeks later, it is still climbing toward noon. And for the first time in a decade, Robert Schwarz, a.k.a. The Iceman, was not there to see it. “When the sun…