So when I published an essay during the summer of Barbenheimer that braided my nuclear obsession with my past grief, questioning why my first husband, J, had died of leukemia at the age of thirty-five ...

An interesting thing about your book is how you blend your role as a scientist with your role as a policymaker. You write about it not in a dry, college textbook-y way, but as a person, and as a ...

Birds began populating my own dreams. A great blue heron glided across the sky of my mind, slow and prehistoric, carrying the world on her back. A million sandhill cranes unspooled from the horizon, ...

In July 2025, we hosted a virtual launch event for this issue, featuring two contributors from the issue—award-winning writers and Orion contributing editors Erica Berry and Meera Subramanian —in a ...

AFTER ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF of dating, Sam and I decided he should move into my house. We had each lived with partners before, but those moves had been swayed by financial stress and global ...

THE CHICKEN WAS UNWELL. She no longer ran to the summons of the leftovers pail to scratch at the compost heap with the other hens. Morning found her in a corner of the henhouse facing the wall, with ...

ONCE I PAID ATTENTION TO IT, the plant appeared everywhere. Its foliage clouded our view of the river. Its vines tangled with my pumpkins, twisted around goldenrod, jewelweed, cow parsnip — in fact, ...

Reflections on time, aging, and Monet's cataracts5. WATER LILIES AND LOTUS FLOWERS —the way they rise through the mud, opening into beautiful blooms—symbolize transcendence and rebirth. I read ...

IN OUR FREE TIME, WE DESTROY TREES. Hundreds of them by now. Five years ago, soon after I bought the place, I gave my partner a Husqvarna 450 Rancher for Christmas. Since then, he’s had to replace the ...

THE HISTORY OF the plastic carrier bag—the kind so often found caught on a tree branch and flagging in the wind—is a story of persuasion. But in the United States, the paper grocery bag proved far ...

Fred Bahnson: With Sun House you bring your love of Eastern wisdom literature together with your love of Western lands and peoples, creating a genre you call the “Eastern Western.” Your characters ...

AS WE ENTER NAMDAPHA NATIONAL PARK and Tiger Reserve in Arunachal Pradesh, where sunlight first touches the Indian subcontinent, we begin to see them: butterflies,mostly solitary, sometimes in a tiny ...