Current Issue

This issue of VQR features the kind of extraordinary, expansive photography that has come to define the magazine for the better part of two decades. Lynn Johnson’s portfolio of portraits revolves around a curious art project that has turned a hardscrabble Sicilian neighborhood into a public veneration of the community’s mothers. Veteran reporter Bianca Stancanelli pens the introductory essay (translated by Antony Shugaar), through which readers will come to know the history of this fascinating, often-overlooked part of Southern Italy.

Meanwhile, Alessandro Cosmelli’s riveting portraits and landscapes help bring to life Marzio Mian’s in-depth reporting tour of the Russia–Estonia border—arguably among the most vulnerable borders in Europe’s face-off with Russia. Through their extensive investigative project, translated by Elettra Pauletto, Cosmelli and Mian deliver a story whose images and prose move the sensory details of this Eastern European front closer with all its tension and even flashes of macabre humor.

Finally, Mandy Barker offers a lush and layered photo essay that possesses the hypnotic vividness of a cabinet of curiosities. This time, however, the main subjects are Australia’s Flesh-footed Shearwaters, birds that mistakenly but habitually feed on the tiny plastic debris in the surrounding ocean waters. Barker’s autopsy is as mesmerizing as it is chilling, and it does more in its simple gestures of cataloging the Shearwaters’ plight than any white paper on marine pollution, laying out the visual testimony on the ravages of plastic in the Earth’s waters.

The issue also includes Sofi Thanhauser’s essay on how the “war on cancer”—a campaign originating with the Nixon administration’s public-health platform—has been a boon for Big Pharma while providing cover for Congresses that have yet to address the environmental causes of cancer.

In Donovan Hohn’s reported essay on 2024’s double emergence of cicada broods, an entomological curiosity becomes a meditation on the measures of time and the fluid relationship between humankind and its understanding of the fauna that surround it.

Bill Cheng, Mimi Lok, and William Pei Shih contribute fiction. The issue also includes poetry by Nikki Giovanni, Leslie Harrison, Sacha Marvin, Erin L. McCoy, and Catherine Pond. The #VQRTrueStory columns see Louie Palu continue his behind-the-scenes look into the performances of politics and Capitol Hill photography and JDSH reinterpret the constraints of visa-photo requirements. Illustrator Gambineri introduces a new story to their comic noir series. And Walton Muyumba picks up his Deep Cuts column by exploring the power of Meshell Ndegeocello’s musical translations.

Cover photo by Lynn Johnson.