Reif Larsen

The face mask, that simple piece of cloth, has become fraught territory. Over the summer, Americans began reading the use or absence of a mask as a political statement, a commentary on individual freedom, an invitation to a fight. Our president and his cadre were agonizingly slow to wear them, often casting the mask as a sign of weakness. Their bare faces have come to symbolize the administration’s negligence and denial.

All lakes, by definition, are temporary. They naturally fill in with sedimentary deposits and disappear, though their geologic lives tend to span millennia. 

The US is filled with remarkable diasporic hot spots, where immigrant and refugee communities have sprung up, most often due to secondary migration patterns.

A wise man once said that every story is the story of someone trying to make a home in a place where he doesn’t belong. The world is filled with such places. An exclave is a piece of land not bound to the rest of its territory, orphaned by geography. Some of these exclaves are enclaves—that is, territory completely surrounded on all sides by another territory.