[Editor’s note: Due to rights restrictions David Quammen’s essay “Mr. Darwin’s Abominable Volume” is not available online. It is only available in the print issue.]

David Quammen is the author of seven books of science writing, including
The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (Scribner, 1996), Wild Thoughts from Wild Places (Scribner, 1999), The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder (Scribner, 2001), and Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (Norton, 2003). He is also a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award, most recently for his National Geographic essay, “Was Darwin Wrong?” His new book, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution, is due out from Norton in 2006.
On New Year's Eve, a small-scale protest never gets off the ground—thanks to police intervention.
The Maine lobster industry has a reputation as one of the best managed fisheries in the world—but few have considered how this ethic is enforced.
Assignment Afghanistan features a new series of audio portraits of Marines in Helmand Province's Sangin District.
A generation ago, a Soviet dam drained the Aral Sea. Can a new dam reclaim it?
Louie Palu describes his twelve years of photographing the mines and mining towns of the Canadian Shield
How an '80s-era quack, who claimed he could cure illness through hypnosis, helps explain the Russian psyche.
The rise and fall of the USSR can be read in the pages of the VQR archive.
Our Russian writer and the photographer Maisie Crow rejoin the crowd of more than one hundred thousand in Moscow.
[Editor’s note: Due to rights restrictions David Quammen’s essay “Mr. Darwin’s Abominable Volume” is not available online. It is only available in the print issue.]


