Orion Summer 2018

STORIES make us who we are. They record our memories, give a reference point for the past that guides us in our present decisions, and—accordingly—shape our future. Stories happen at both the level of the individual and at the level of the species. Each of us has our own unique set of stories that shape our experience of what it means to be alive. And the whole of humanity has its own story collection that records what we have been and points the way toward what we might become. In our current need to understand the ways humans are affecting the planet—including, especially, the need to change those ways—the power of storytelling is critically important. Which stories move us forward to a better understanding of the world and our place…

Kazim Ali is the author of Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies and a collection of poetry, Inquisition. Wendell Berry is the author of more than thirty books, including The Unsettling of America, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, and The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Webb Chappell has been a Boston-based freelance editorial photographer for over thirty years. He spends most of his free time in nature. Jessica A. Cook is a community connector and practical creative. She is committed to social justice through migrant rights, artisan business, food access, and youth arts. Duy Doan is the author of We Play a Game, winner of the 2017 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. A Kundiman fellow, he received an MFA from Boston University. Carmella de los Angeles Guiol is a Miami-based…

FROM OUR READERS KIM TODD’S ESSAY, “The Island Wolves” (May/June 2017), represents science as a human discipline, appropriately humble. The scientists who study the wolves of Isle Royale understand themselves as pursuers of truths not fully known, perhaps never to be fully known. They speak of themselves and their practice with exemplary honesty: I was dead wrong Things are much more complicated than we thought…. I would trust these scientists, so long as they speak with such admirable candor, and with what I take to be a humility proper to humans. It is startling to turn from Ms. Todd’s report on the science of wolves to Dean Kuipers’s review of The War on Science, by Shawn Otto. As Dean Kuipers and Shawn Otto understand it, science is an omniscient deity…

I HAD A LIST of things to look for during my visit to Singapore, and most of them were green. I found one on the very first day, as I wandered through an indoor mall in a jet-lagged haze. A walk around the shops was the most complex task my poor brain could cope with after a thirteen-hour flight from London, which had hurled me half a day forward in time. When my gaze alighted on a slice of pandan cake in a café window, I felt a surge of recognition. I had read about this Singaporean treat before the trip. It is a simple sponge cake, very light and flavored with the leaves of the pandan plant, which colors it an iridescent pale green. I later learned that Pandanus…

THERE IS NO ROAD, hasn’t been a road since Gerlach, that crust of a town where we turned from pavement to playa, to hairline-fractured hardpan, and the truck transcended its truckness to become one with the earth. Dust swings left and right in the rearview mirror, a brown tail whipping into oblivion the memories of Reno’s traffic and Fernley’s crowded Walmart parking lot. Ancient Lake Lahontan’s parched floor is at once beneath our tires and in the air. The dust erases and welcomes. The dust coats tongues. The four of us—childhood friends from Vermont, high school brothers scattered to various corners of the country, so-called grown men—don’t give a fat flying hoot about next month’s Burning Man festivities. We’ve pilgrimaged to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert not for 60,000 humans, not…

Stephanie Wilde’s “Murder of Crows” is a collection of paintings that speaks to the polarizing qualities of race, religion, and political views. The title is a reference to flock behavior, herding, and the mob mentality that so often accompanies examples of polarization. Racial discrimination and slavery have deep roots in the United States; our national history reflects patterns of equating racial otherness with inferiority. Similarly, religion has been configured into a political instrument used to divide and judge people. Rather than being a personal journey, it has been appropriated by select groups to increase political power and has turned our society into a “they, them, or us” culture.…