By Patrick Ritter On a dugout canoe trip through the interior of New Guinea, how far would you go for a pair of shoes? I heard a splash behind me and I froze midstroke. Sounded close. I twisted around to see a large tree crashing into the water. The Sepik River winds across the swamplands […]

By Janna Brancolini How a female pioneer of underwater archaeology teamed up with a Sicilian winemaker to save a priceless ancient shipwreck. Buried beneath the floor of the Mediterranean, in waters so turbulent the epic poet Homer had imagined the thrashings of sea monsters, the ship waited. She had once defended an ancient settlement near […]

By Robert Dale Fama A premature midlife crisis, a sack of money, and a backpack combine to reveal that a beginner traveler learns quick in the Sahara. We had already broken down five times when Amadou snapped the ignition key off in his dilapidated Land Rover. He reached up and rubbed his necklace, a black […]

By Edward Stanton You wanted to get farther away from home, beyond the border and Baja California, deeper into the country.  The city of Saltillo lay on a slope of the Sierra Madre Oriental, just north of the central plateau, about 5,000 feet high.  There you found a boardinghouse with a courtyard on Calle Xicoténcatl […]

By Colette O’Connor “Just add three letters to Paris and you have paradise.” —Jules Renard The family Dubois of Avenue Foch are French. That is to say, the family Dubois are different. In an age when nearly half of American marriages collapse, often in smoking heaps of anger, bitterness, pain, I often wondered, what does […]

By Jacob Kemp When I turned twenty-one, I spent the better part of a year in an attic, hiding from Nazis. The calendar read 2011. I had just graduated from college. I was offered a role in The Diary of Anne Frank, to play Peter Van Daan. So I packed a suitcase, a carry-on, my […]

By Marcia DeSanctis There was danger, even in the presence of angels. February is not the ideal time for a road trip to northern France, but the moodiness of the sea, wind, and sky appeals to a certain breed of loner like me, drawn to the echoing voids of the off-season. Coastal Normandy is famous […]

By Tom Miller The best guitar maker in Cuba. Three events—baseball, Pope Jon Paul’s visit, and the Elián González case—exposed Cuba to the American public far beyond the embargo. Yet it was the improbable success of a handful of aging musicians that exposed a Cuba few knew and expanded the country’s audiences far beyond its […]

By Erin Byrne Little by little, his spirit expanded in harmony with the cathedral.—Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame She’s had many lives and here was the burnt offering of another. Notre Dame’s lace spire sizzled and crumbled as it fell, and the gigantic hole it created became a cauldron. Flames, golden to orange […]

By Chase Nelson A modern-day rescue mission raises questions of life and death. With her husband looking on, we took turns pumping her heart for her, pushing blood to her organs, to her extremities, hoping for a gasp to bring her back, tearful and afraid, from wherever she was now. Technically, they were called compressions. […]