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The Resurrectionists

By Ryan Bradley, Illustrations by Valero Doval

Spring 2022

When I was young, my dad would take me to the hospital, usually on weekends, mostly on Saturdays. He was visiting his patients, the ones he’d operated on earlier that week, when he’d replaced their hip or their knee. I remember these mornings quite well because I knew, even then, that they were not normal.

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The Golden Fleece

By Jim Coan

Spring 2022

Long ago, in the ancient year of 1975, two ambitious young scientists sought to apply the awesome power of SCIENCE to the study of LOVE. But a strange little senator from Wisconsin vowed to MAKE THEM PAY! Jim Coan presents: The Golden Fleece Award!

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Hanford’s B Reactor, now part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Even though most of the site is now deemed safe for the public, warning signs for radiological hazards are reminders that the effects of decades of contamination have not disappeared. Photography by Sean McDermott.

Cold War, Hot Mess

By Lois Parshley, Photography by Sean McDermott

Fall 2021

After decades of mismanaging its nuclear waste, the US Department of Energy wrestles with its toxic legacy.

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Illustration by Lauren Simkin Berke

Mutations

By Raj Telhan, Illustrations by Lauren Simkin Berke

Fall 2021

Is it possible to understand the persistent lag in vaccination rates as a function of failed metaphor? That is to say, as a failure of language—the language of data, the language of science, the language of political rhetoric (to name just a few vocabularies)—to meet individuals at their particular coordinates on the social map? The virus and our national response to it has been figured and refigured.

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<i>Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War</i>. By M. Susan Lindee. Harvard UP, 2020. 296pp. HB, $45.

They’re Using You to Kill People

By Trevor Quirk

December 3, 2020

Thomas Pynchon found an accommodating symbol in the Aggregat 4 (aka the V-2) rocket, a weapon that could not save the war for the Greater German Reich but became operational soon enough to kill thousands huddled under the throbbing sirens of London. The centerpiece of his 1973 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, was the world’s first supersonic ranged weapon, arriving at its target before its pitched scream. 

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<i>Mullus Surmuletus, The Striped Surmulet</i>. (Courtesy Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library, Digital Collections.)

The Grand Temptation

By Lulu Miller

March 2, 2020

Maybe Cape Cod is fertile ground for existential transformation. Something about the metals in its sandy soil catalyzing metaphysical shifts—I don’t know. All I know is I had my entire worldview rearranged when I was visiting its shores.

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Interview and comic by Jess Ruliffson

The Final Act

By Jess Ruliffson

March 6, 2018

Dr. Thomas A. Andrew served as New Hampshire's Chief Medical Examiner for two decades, retiring in September 2017 amid the growing opioid crisis. Now he's studying to become an ordained deacon in extension ministry to help at-risk youth on the Appalachian Trail.

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Illustration by Victo Ngai

Once Bitten

By Laura Kolbe, Illustrations by Victo Ngai, Haisam Hussein

Summer 2016

Hundreds of thousands of cases of dengue fever have been reported in Puerto Rico, and yet little attention has been paid to the problem. In 2009 and 2010, the eighty-eight recorded dengue cases in Key West were the serious inducement needed to find solutions.

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Gosia Herba

Soucouyant

By Tiffany Briere

Winter 2015

The mouse before me is dead, its body emptied of organs. Dead but still innervated, so still blinking in this world. I only harvest from their core—heart, lungs, liver, and the rest—but soon I will have to work with their brains.

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