The Course Writing Rhizomatically Rhizomes are the runners that many plants and trees (like sassafras, elder, Solomon’s seal, ferns, and mayapples) send forth as they spread outward from a “mother” ...

An archiving expert and a dramaturg on the radical act of preserving your bits and bobs, why context matters, and the magic ...

AS THE WEATHER GETS WARMER each year, something unavoidable happens: the insects come back out. While some find the bugs ...

TO BUILD LASTING FURNITURE requires that I tap into this connection to the animal. It would be easy to imagine the body as a machine. The motions of building are repetitive—pulling a handsaw through ...

The Future is Fungi“The mushroom pushes against boundaries,” writes Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “and in doing so, it creates an opening.” So often, when humans look at mushrooms, we’re apt to see solutions ...

MY CONVERSATION WITH ARTURO would happen after I returned home, but on the last weekend of my Oregon trip, I buckled into Joe’s gray Toyota Tacoma truck as he drove us out to Mount Pisgah Arboretum.

Corey Pressman: My question to you all to get started is why fungi, and why now? Merlin Sheldrake: I think there are a few reasons why we’re seeing a surge of interest in fungi right now. One is that ...

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN eating mushrooms for at least twelve thousand years, according to the fungal micro-remains found in Paleolithic dental samples in a mountain cave in Eastern Spain. Yet the idea of ...

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 ...

THE FACT THAT I have never been a skilled singer has never kept me from karaoke. In adolescence, I was a part-time theater kid, a past that left me with a simmering, unquenched desire for some kind of ...

(This essay was a finalist for a 2010 National Magazine Award in the Essay category.) OUT ON THE BIG DRY we had to kill to live: Come October, we’d herd a yearling lamb into the west pen, throw it ...

JO: I sometimes feel that in an individualistic culture, people get freaked out by the idea of being tied down or responsible for anything. Thinking about a gift economy, they might say, “I want the ...