Rachel Nolan
An Amazonian Exodus

The discovery of a Bible led a Peruvian man on a decades-long process of conversion, leading him and his disciples to a settlement in the West Bank, where they became caught up in a demographic contest with Palestinians for the future of Israel.

Clare Bucknell
Cannibals and Guillotines

Far from a straightforward propagandist, the caricaturist James Gillray preferred pleasing, or irritating, many different kinds of customers.

A Giraffe Eating a Swan

a poem by 
Frederick Seidel

When I get to heaven
The thing I know I’ll hear
Is the hissing of the trees
On a heavenly day in Central Park,
Trees in a breeze seen from above
On fire with green fireworks
Of sunlight messing with their hair…

Free from the Archives

One year ago last Friday, February 24, Vladimir Putin announced on Russian state television a “special military operation” against Ukraine. Within minutes, explosions were heard across Ukraine, and Russian troops invaded the country from the north, east, and south.

Six hours before Putin’s declaration, Tim Judah filed a dispatch from Kharkiv, which we published online and in our March 24, 2022, issue. In the weeks leading up to the invasion, Judah traveled from Lviv to Odesa to Kyiv, and found most people trying to go about their daily lives: “I met a teacher who told me that she veers between panic and shrugging it all off.” Still, indications of the tenacious resistance that would soon take hold were everywhere: “Almost all schools that once taught in Russian have switched to Ukrainian, which has helped nurture a new generation proud to be Ukrainian.”

Tim Judah
Ukraine on the Brink

“In my experience it is quite normal to refuse to believe that you are about to be engulfed by a cataclysm that will change your life forever—or kill you.”