For The Dial, in this excerpt from his chapbook, Jig, Jan Steyn, who is a translator by trade, writes of his experiences living with gout, a painful and frustrating medical condition. Sufferers are unable to flush uric acid out of the body effectively, leaving behind crystals that plague the skin and joints, causing inflammation, swelling, and pain.

In most bodies, excess uric acid leaves discreetly; in mine it lingers and precipitates, mainly in the joints. The resulting crystals are microscopic, the textbooks insist. I know this and still go about my day as if they were larger, because the word “crystal” insists on an image: coarse salt on a wind-scoured Namibian beach — white flats beneath a blown sky — lodged now in wrist, in toe, in small deposits under the skin. I picture them tearing at cartilage when I move; I picture movement grinding them down, like salt flakes crumbling between finger and thumb.

A theoretical knowledge of a disease is quite different from an embodied one. Knowing the word “tophus” is not the same as watching one rise, pearl-like, through your own skin. The terms were familiar to me, the lab values known, the protocols routine: NSAIDs and Colchicine for a flare-up, Allopurinol for maintenance; water, rest, weight loss, patience. Yet none of this teaches me how to stand up in the middle of the night on feet like pomegranates — granate in Afrikaans, “grenades” when translated back into English — red, swollen, seeded with glass shards, and ready to explode.

“Don’t believe them,” reads one Google review for HAARP—the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, where researchers study the relationship between radio waves and Earth’s ionosphere. “This facility is used to control the weather.” Kaitlyn Tiffany travels to Gakona, Alaska, to tour the HAARP facility and speak with research scientists about how dealing with conspiratorial beliefs is now a part of their work life. Asked to speculate about the persistence of HAARP conspiracy theories, an engineer tells Tiffany, “Well, one thing is it’s in the middle of nowhere and it’s got a fence around it.”

Still, the calls to the lab continue. The Facebook posts go viral. The university has held open houses, posted public information pages, and produced irreverent merch, but nothing seems to tamp down suspicion. Jessica Matthews, HAARP’s director, is an Air Force veteran, and her first instinct was to deal with conspiracy theories in the style of the military: “If left to myself, I wouldn’t say anything,” she told me. “But that’s not the right answer.”

In this edition: Lost soul, copy that, missing beats, muzzled watchdogs, and a ramblin’ man.

Magazines like The Source and XXL were more than outlets for brilliant journalism; they were a corrective to the dismissive, even racist way mainstream music outlets approached hip-hop. In too many cases, though, these magazines’ print archives were never digitized—and now, with so many defunct or simply beset by link rot, a crisis of impermanence is threatening the culture’s written history.

For readers like me, these magazines transformed us from mere consumers of rap into obsessives. They represented the pinnacle of culture journalism for approximately 15 years, but you can’t find much of it online. The archives of The New Yorker and Rolling Stone have made the digital transition, and their old articles, interviews and reviews are available in an easily searchable format. The institutional rap titles have not. Their websites are largely an unnavigable mess in which one is more likely to encounter 404 errors than articles. This is annoying, but it’s also a dangerous blind spot in history that could have a profound impact on the way we think, talk, and move forward as a culture. How did this happen? More importantly, is there anything we can do about it?

In this epic, 13,000+ word piece, McKay Coppins investigates the massive popularity of sports betting in America, and the havoc it’s wreaking on leagues, athletes, and gamblers and their families. To make sure he had some skin in the game for the story, Coppins struck a deal with The Atlantic: They gave him a stake of $10,000 to bet with, pledging to split any profits with him 50-50. No one could have bet on what happened to Coppins, a practicing Mormon man with four kids “more likely to be found wrestling a toddler into a car seat than scouring moneylines or consulting betting touts.”

I routinely stayed up past midnight scrolling through the apps, my face illuminated in the dark of our bedroom by brightly colored ads for “NO SWEAT BETS” and “SAME GAME PARLAYS.” I impatiently swiped away FanDuel’s “Reality Check” pop-ups, which notified me, in what I took to be a passive-aggressive tone of disapproval, that I was spending quite a lot of time on the platform.

It was now common for my family to catch me furtively tapping in wagers. On one occasion, my 10-year-old son discovered me on my phone in the kitchen pantry, where I’d gone to get snacks for the kids, and announced, “Dad is hiding again!” On another, Annie happened to glance down the pew at church just as I was sneaking a peek at DraftKings. “You’re addicted,” she stage-whispered.

As the cost of living continues to spiral upward, the Trump administration is gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency built to protect Americans from financial ruin. Created by Elizabeth Warren under the authority of the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB has issued $21 billion in direct relief to consumers and recovered $5 billion in civil penalties from big banks, tech companies, and other entities. Anyone could file a complaint against a business through the bureau’s online portal. The CFPB helped people avoid home foreclosure, protected them from the toll of exorbitant medical debt, and got student loans forgiven. Now it’s a shell:

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., granted a preliminary injunction, ordering the bureau to retain employees and perform the obligations laid out under Dodd-Frank. The agency appealed the case, which is ongoing. (At a three-hour oral argument last month, an attorney for the Trump Administration argued that the bureau would technically still exist even if the entire staff was eliminated.) Vought complied with the prohibition against layoffs but didn’t let employees do much beyond what his deputy, Adam Martinez, referred to as “closeout duties.” Workers reluctantly dropped lawsuits and settlements, scrubbed educational materials from the internet, and reversed regulations and interpretive rules. No new companies were examined or investigated. (“We’ve been insanely busy since we took over the agency a year ago,” a CFPB spokesperson wrote, in an e-mail, contesting this account. “If you were to pay attention to our reports, court cases, etc you would know that.”) Six months into Vought’s tenure, Hardy, the examiner, told me, “I’ve been given one assignment, and that was to close a supervisory action.” Like other federal employees, she was required to list five accomplishments in a weekly e-mail. “I’d just copy and paste: ‘I did not violate Director Vought’s stop-work order,’ ” she said. In July, she met with her manager for a midterm review, but there was nothing to review. The CFPB has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to employees who aren’t allowed to do their jobs.

Andrew O’Hagan’s essay is a brutal exposé of Prince Andrew and his ex‑wife Sarah Ferguson, tracing a long pattern of entitlement, grifting, and ethically dubious behavior that began decades before Andrew’s association with Jeffrey Epstein. He portrays them as habitually exploiting their royal status to chase freebies, money, and influence in shady settings around the world. Seen together in this one piece, their choices reveal a shocking, sustained culture of decadence and impunity—visible long before any formal scandal erupted.

Thanks to multiple investigations, several court cases and Lownie’s excellent book, their downfall has emerged as an emblematic story of our age. In September 2001, Andrew was given a role as UK special representative for international trade and investment. ‘The appointment came with the support of the queen,’ Lownie writes, ‘and the endorsement of the former trade secretary Peter Mandelson.’ Andrew was a walking category error, perceiving no difference between business and pleasure, between what was good for the country and what was excellent for him, conducting a campaign of international larceny masquerading as public service. Charles thought the job as envoy was a disaster waiting to happen: Andrew was almost certain to disgrace himself in a dramatic way.

Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.

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Kendra Atleework | Longreads | March 12, 2026 | 4,107 words (17 minutes)

Afternoon at my grandparents’ house, dusty sun bolts across the old blue carpet, and me sitting on the floor, staring up at a clock on the wall carved from dark wood in the shape of a house. The iron weights that hang below the clock are spruce cones; the tiny roof is delicately shingled. The minute hand seems to drag until, finally, the hour strikes. A door opens, and a bird pops out and chirps dustily. Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. 

The first cuckoo clock was made in the 1730s in the Black Forest village of Schönwald, which means “beautiful forest.” The bird in question was supposed to be a rooster, but when the clockmaker tested his little leather bellows, the rooster sounded rather anemic, and the cuckoo clock was born. 

From darkness the cuckoo emerges and to darkness she returns. And I—child of desert mountains and blasting sun—am enthralled and a little afraid. I await that bird because she comes from a place I don’t understand, popping into the chatter of our American living room and then retreating to the shadows, leaving me sitting there alone, wondering why I cannot follow.

Thirty years later, 30 minutes by car from Schönwald, I sit beneath another clock in a room full of naked Germans. Cheek-to-cheek on benches, faces sweaty in the lamplight, they have never been more at ease. The couple who shares my table cheers as a waitress rolls in a beer cart. Cuckoo, cuckoo. 

The Black Forest is a region in southwestern Germany, about the size of the state of Delaware and home to around a million people—practically deserted, by German standards. It is spruce trees with trailing branches, and silver fir whose soft, dark needles seem to swallow sunlight, for which the Romans gave the Black Forest its name. It is high pastures and rivers and mountains with villages tucked into dark valleys. The forest itself is owned by municipalities, the state of Baden-Württemberg, and families, many of whom have lived on the same farms for centuries. It is at once a cohesive region and a patchwork, unified by the evergreens that cover the land like a blanket. 

My first time in the Black Forest, as a tourist on a camping trip, I stood over a mirror of a lake and trailed my fingers in the water. I watched a dark wall of reflected spruce trees tremble and fade. Three years later, for reasons I’m still trying to understand, I returned, moving alone to a country where I knew no one, a country with a strange language and stranger customs. Not even an anything-goes Californian like me could have dreamed up a naked beer tasting, but today I’m integrating. This particular sauna is built to a theme called Heimatstube, which translates roughly to “cozy home living room” and is decorated accordingly. The room sits at 160 degrees Fahrenheit, and while only beer is served here, the interior perfectly emulates the traditional farmhouse dining rooms that dot the Black Forest. The floor, walls, furniture, ceilings: all spruce. The windows: fake, featuring illuminated scenes of flower boxes heaping with red geraniums and, beyond, the wooded mountains. 

At this moment, what I know about the Black Forest can be summed up in the glossy brochures at the tourist information office in my new city of Freiburg. If you’ve only got a weekend to spend here, the Black Forest is chocolate layer cake, white-frosted and topped with cherries. It’s smiling women wearing folk hats piled with giant red pompoms. It’s huge, hulking farmhouses, their dark-shingled roofs reaching almost to the ground.

In the months to come, I’ll stand in the smoke kitchen of one such farmhouse, the walls blackened and still stinking, where women forfeited their lungs and died young. I’ll learn how people hacked out a living farming poor soil in these steep valleys, how the plague and roving soldiers tore through their farms, how they baked bread once a month and then ate it moldy. The forest cut off travel, concealed bandits, blocked the light from crops. 

The descendants of those farmers are now contentedly draining the last of their beer and sweating into their towels. “Does anyone have a joke for us?” the waitress with the beer cart hollers. “No? Don’t be shy: You’re already all naked!” 

The room guffaws. Cheerful folk music oompahs through the Heimatstube. The waitress tells her own joke about drowned stepmothers, which sails right over my head. It’s not just the thick local dialect. I sit on my towel in the warm closeness between these wooden walls and make up my mind to understand, to follow the cuckoo back into the darkness, or at least to try.  

This will be more complicated than I imagine. I’ve wandered into the heart of a fabled forest whose inhabitants both control and are controlled by their landscape, fates entwined. I’ve arrived at a time when ways of life that have dominated here for centuries are being upended, and no one knows quite what is to come.

Ludwig Weis—Tatjana, his wife, calls him Ludi—has bright eyes and plug earrings. Mid-40s, slim and athletic, his corduroy pants are no longer the scourge of rural German childhood that they were in the ‘80s. Now they’re a vibe, especially coupled with Ludwig’s vest and rolled shirtsleeves. 

I sit with Ludwig and Tatjana at a dark wooden table in the dining room of Landgasthaus Grüner Baum: the Green Tree country inn, a 477-year-old farmstead in the quiet Black Forest valley of Simonswald. The Grüner Baum is a real Heimatstube, complete with red geraniums in the window boxes and low-hanging lamps. When she met Ludwig, Tatjana was only a guest here, fleeing the city for Black Forest calm. Ludwig is the great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandson of the Grüner Baum’s first farmer. 

The restaurant isn’t open yet, and the dining room is dark and quiet. Out the window, mist pours over the mountains. I’ve asked to talk to Tatjana and Ludwig because of two portraits hanging in the shadows on the wall. 

I’d seen the portraits once before, on an earlier, unplanned visit, just a few months after arriving in Germany. I took a friend from out of town into the forest, where we spent the day getting lost and getting rained on. We missed our bus. Warm light shone from the windows of the Grüner Baum. 

I didn’t know how to eat the trout I ordered, which arrived beautiful and intact. 

“May I?” The waiter stooped, took the knife from my hand, leaned close, and cut a delicate line down the spine. With flourish he parted the silver skin and lifted the vertebrae, the lacy ribs. The white flesh steamed. My friend ordered brandy made from apples and pears, and we doused our potatoes in melted butter. The dark wooden clock on the wall struck the hour. When I looked up, I saw the portraits: a woman in a black vest and, beside her, the man who had just carved my trout. 

The couple in the portraits wear traditional folk costumes, down to the woman’s puffed white sleeves and the daisies embroidered on the straps of the man’s suspenders. They resemble the subjects of the folk portraits that hang all over the Black Forest, with some exceptions: At the Grüner Baum, the woman wears a skull painted over her face, and the man is shirtless, tattooed shoulders exposed. 

“That’s weird,” my friend said. And I thought: That’s something I want to understand. 

Now, Ludwig and Tatjana regard their likenesses. 

“We wanted something that reflected the fact that we’re not necessarily the most traditional people,” Tatjana says. Her hair is shaved short on the sides and she wears a fleece pullover against the November chill. 

“Those are traditional Simonswald folk costumes,” Ludwig says, his German a-swish with a touch of the regional Alemannic dialect. “But whether the two of us are traditional in our minds . . .”

“We thought, it should be a mixture,” Tatjana says. “Just as everything here is somehow a mixture of tradition and nontradition.”

The shoot was an experiment, Ludwig says. “We had several different setups—without a hat, with a hat, with a shirt. And then the photographer asked, ‘Are you tattooed?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’” And so the heir to the long, long legacy of the Grüner Baum stands bare on the dining room wall. 

On my first fateful trip through the Black Forest years ago, I saw countless dark farmhouses like the Grüner Baum, firewood heaped beneath the overhanging roofs and wooden exteriors time-blackened, so ubiquitous they were part of the landscape. Never had I seen such buildings before. I wondered, why are they so huge? And whatever do they do with them now? Now I know: In these farmhouses, all generations of two or more families, plus farmhands paid in room and board, plus livestock, lived together, the people sleeping one story above the stables so that in winter steamy animal heat rose to them through the floorboards. They stitched folk costumes and hung ox heads in attic rafters to ward away evil.

Above the portraits in the Grüner Baum, the ceiling is patched and crisscrossed with beams. Ludwig follows my gaze. “The ceiling reigns supreme,” he says. “It’s crooked, it’s bent. It should be left alone. Everything that happens underneath it can change. But the ceiling stays.” 

The Grüner Baum, first documented under this name in 1548, began as a farm. “Until the 1980s—1982, 1983, you could actually survive on agriculture,” Ludwig says. “Of course, children never had new clothes. We always wore our siblings’ old clothes. But even if it wasn’t much, it was enough.” Guests counted as extra income—locals stopping by for schnapps, ham, beer, fish sandwiches. 

“Life was simpler and less demanding,” says Ludwig. “And people were just happy, they were just satisfied.” 

Things change. Of agriculture, at least at the Grüner Baum, Ludwig says, “There’s nothing left. From April to October, especially in this valley, we all live off tourism.” People come from the Netherlands and Italy and Switzerland and France. Spaniards come north in the summer to cool off. 

“Biker groups,” Tajana says. “Sometimes a Korean tour group, when you have to wonder, where did they hear about us?”

“It started with a film,” Ludwig says, “in the 1950s. A famous film called Schwarzwaldmädel. A German production, and in color—completely new for people.” The film, whose title translates to “Black Forest Gal,” tells the story of a young artist fleeing urban drear to an idyllic, fictional village. Schwarzwaldmädel launched the region to fame and solidified its iconic, if partly made-up, attributes in the public imagination: a mythic forest, a daydream for beleaguered post-war workers. 

“The first vacationers who came here didn’t even know where they were going,” Ludwig says. And what drew all of them here? What drew a Californian after a camping trip to uproot her whole life and cross the Atlantic?

Outside, fog pools in the patches where the forest is bare. 

“The last few years have been a bit stressful again, due to the heat,” Ludwig says. “But this has been a good year for the forest.”

“Right now there’s a huge area of forest up there where there are no trees anymore,” says Tatjana. “The price of wood is supposed to be good, so a lot is being harvested.”

We all look out the window for a moment. 

“For sale, for sale,” Ludwig murmurs. “It’s all commercial forest here.” The word he uses is Nutzwald: use-forest. “And when you harvest, you have to replant accordingly. It’s always a cycle.” 

“Still,” Tatjana says. “I love the forest.”

The first forest to surround farmers like Ludwig’s ancestors was old growth: beech, oak, and, higher up, fir. The farmers took that forest and they turned it into clocks and coal and patches of sunlight, the things they needed to survive. They taught their descendants to do the same. 

Isn’t it dangerous? I ask Tatjana. Is it dangerous to love something, if you can wake up and find it gone?

“That happens all the time,” she says. “Just there,” she gestures toward the mountain out the window. “But it doesn’t disappear completely. There’s an open area where there was no open area before, yes. But now you can see into the valley, and that’s beautiful too. And the trees are growing again.” She pauses. “And I always think that life is change. As soon as nothing changes anymore, there is stagnation. And stagnation is death.”

It’s the winter solstice at the end of a quarter century, early in the morning, and the forest is once more cloaked in fog. I’m in the car with my friend Rebecca, who herself moved to Germany from the redwoods of the California coast. Ninety-five percent of our time together has been spent in the forest; it turns out one can build quite a friendship in the liminal darkness. 

Rebecca drives us up and up, through villages of half-timbered houses. Then we pierce the fog, and a person could forget she is in one of the most densely populated countries in Europe: range upon range of ridges thick with evergreens float in a white sea, the sprawl of cities magicked away. We park in an empty lot beneath dangling chairlifts on a mountain bare of snow and walk into the Bannwald. 

Bann means spell: a magical hold, a fascination or a curse. The first time I came across a sign reading Bannwald on a hiking trail, I assumed I was in an enchanted forest, helpfully designated as such by the local municipality—until I learned that Bann means “ban” in this context, and a Bannwald is a forest in which commercial activity is banned. 

A Bannwald, then, enjoys a spell of protection cast upon it by the powers that be. Such areas, comprising less than 1 percent of the Black Forest, were mostly established in the 1970s, when acid rain falling over Germany made life unpleasant enough to spur new environmental protections. But the particular Bannwald into which Rebecca and I wander has been left alone since 1911. That makes it 114 years old—admittedly 800 years younger than the cobbled streets that wind through Freiburg, but still one of the first protected forests in the country and intended to serve as a reference ecosystem. 

But why would a place as fabled as the Black Forest need a reference ecosystem?  

“Vast tracts of the Black Forest landscape were once bare,” Dr. Jürgen Bauhus, professor and chair of Silviculture at the University of Freiburg, told me one rainy night in his office, where we sat beneath a minimalist cuckoo clock painted in green. “In the 18th and 19th centuries, a lot of the forest was cleared for agricultural purposes and to feed the early industries that moved in.” 

After the clear-cutting came mudslides and wood shortages, a volcanic winter, a famine, an exodus of half-starved farmers to the New World. Those who remained, like Ludwig’s ancestors, looked around at the barren mountains that had once been the Black Forest and began the job of replanting. For this they chose the spruce: fast and straight-growing, its wood boasting a versatile springiness. The spruce is also frost tolerant, a quality crucial to its survival during the mini ice age of the 1800s. In the centuries that followed, generations passed down the art of spruce cultivation. 

Spruce, then, with its draping branches, its dangling cones, its pointed leader, is the tree whose wood is carved into cuckoo clocks, whose cones of cast iron hung as clock weights on my grandparents’ wall—the tree upon which, even now, entire industries, building practices, and an economy are based. When the world looks to the Black Forest, the world sees spruce. 

Here in the Bannwald, Rebecca and I find a tiny spruce sapling straining hopefully toward a beam of light. At this elevation, around 3,000 feet, the solstice air is clear and cold. We walk deeper, and we find something that we have been missing in the Black Forest. 

We have been missing death. And here death appears, a form of life on the forest floor. Across most of the Black Forest, as in other parts of Germany, the understory feels conspicuously empty. In many places, the forest is a spruce monoculture, trees all about the same age, standing above near-bare ground and not nurtured by the previous generation. The previous generation, after all, has gone for paper, parquet, chairs, musical instruments—all the things found in my Freiburg apartment. 

In Germany, spruce trees are harvested by the age of 80 or 100 years old. In its true home, a spruce can live to be 1000, a silver fir 600, a beech 500. After that, in the twilight realm of the understory, the goings-on are handed over to fungi far older than the tree species themselves. Here in this relatively old patch of Black Forest we can see the cycle in its riotous beginnings. We walk, reveling in root balls thrust into the light and robed in spiderwebs. Crackle of dry winter ferns underfoot, the wet and glistening fallen trunks melting into loam—a beautiful chaos; the oldest kind of order. When a forest regenerates naturally, fallen trunks protect saplings from wind and grazing and the forest comes back faster and stronger. Deliciously dead, Rebecca calls it. We marvel at a nursery tree swaddled in moss, a row of saplings rising from its trunk.

We’re halfway done with our loop, the thin sun fighting its way through the canopy from time to time, and we say to each other: This feels like some kind of hope. This Bannwald is early in its journey toward old growth. Perhaps great heights lie ahead for that little spruce sapling reaching toward sunlight at the side of the trail. And now we come upon a pile of trunks tossed across each other, broken like bones. And here another—and on it goes. Wow! we say. How we’ve missed this. If only the forests around Freiburg were this way. And here another, swathes and swathes. It is as if a flood tore across this mountain, where no flood has been. 

After a while Rebecca says, “It’s actually kind of a lot, isn’t it?” 

We notice an odd pattern on the regal stumps: pits peppering the wood, like bullet holes in a metal sign in the desert. And now here’s a clearing of pitted silver trunks, dead where they stand, pale branches reaching. I peer inside a hole and think of the cuckoo. And then I remember something else Jürgen Bauhus told me: trace of sawdust and bore holes. Beetles have stripped these trees of their bark. 

Not every tree. A couple of slender evergreens appear untouched. I clamber up on the pile of trunks to get a better look. And then I realize: The living trees are fir. Every fallen tree beneath my feet—every tree standing dead—is a spruce. 

There in the Bannwald, where the evidence is left to lie, we see what is otherwise more difficult to make out. Such “massive mortality,” as Bauhus called it, happens because warming temperatures pitch old neighbors into an unfair fight. Spruce sick and weak from drought and heat stress succumb while beetle numbers explode. No mystery waits inside the darkness of these bore holes, only dead wood. 

Like the bark beetle, the spruce is indigenous to the Black Forest, but it has only one true home. So said soil ecologist Kenton Stutz, himself a Californian come east, some weeks ago as we drove through the forest in his orange research van. Shallow-rooted spruce lack a tap root anchoring them to the earth and thus need special conditions. “Wet, cold, protected northern slopes. Places that get a lot of cold air drainage,” Kenton said. “And basically nowhere else.” 

“People accuse foresters in the past of planting the wrong trees,” said Dr. Johann Goldammer, fire ecologist and leader of the Global Fire Monitoring Center, when I met with him in his Freiburg office. “But in the previous climate, which prevailed until the early 2000s, the spruce was a success story. Now that story has come to an end.”

All the cuckoo clocks bought by tourists and carried home and hung on walls all over the world are now counting down the hours. According to Bauhus’s research, climate change has rendered the Black Forest largely uninhabitable to spruce. 

There is some hope in the native silver fir and the Douglas fir brought over from North America. Both firs survive drought better than spruce. But even these hardier trees are no longer able to thrive at elevations under 2,300 feet, meaning the range of evergreens will be limited to the highlands of the Black Forest. Everywhere else, only deciduous trees will grow.

And when you harvest, you have to replant accordingly, Ludwig said—but replanting accordingly no longer means what it once did; replanting in Simonswald where the Grüner Baum stands at 1,200 feet means something completely different now than it did to Ludwig’s ancestors. And a hardwood forest is beautiful, too. But a hardwood forest is not black; the leaves do not absorb all light on a bright and hot afternoon. A hardwood forest does not sequester carbon all winter long. 

How long before the spruce are gone? I asked Bauhus. 

“God knows,” he replied. 

“There was a drought,” Kenton Stutz told me in the van. “From 2018 until 2022. Or arguably 2023.” He told me of the Harz Mountains in Germany, a densely forested region to the north that was once entirely covered in spruce. “After that drought, essentially, there were no more spruce still standing in those mountains.” 

A friend took a trip through that northern forest and came back talking of Mordor. 

Could something like that hit the Black Forest? I had asked Kenton. Could everything change, just like that? 

“Quite possibly,” he said. 

In his office, beneath the green cuckoo clock, Jürgen Bauhus told me of farms not unlike the Grüner Baum, farms that have existed on the same land for 30 generations, a thousand years. 

“Their greatest asset, their experiential knowledge, is eroding so quickly,” he said. “Whatever they have learned now from their fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, is of little value.”

Rebecca and I walk through the death groves, and she remembers the drought of 2018: the way the city begged residents to water the urban trees; the way the spruce along her favorite hiking path died before her eyes. 

“What we have to tell them,” Bauhus said of the people on the old farms, “is that many of these species that we have cultivated in the past are simply not possible in the future. And we don’t necessarily have alternatives.” 

Is there resistance? I asked. On the old farms, is there grief? 

“There is all of that,” he said. “But they have seen many changes in the landscape and they are aware that the forest is a dynamic thing.” 

I remind myself that today’s Black Forest of spruce is not the Black Forest of fir that the Romans named; that the forest of fir is returning, at least partially.  

“Life is change,” Tatjana said. “The moment nothing changes anymore, I’m dead.”

But that doesn’t make it easy. 

Back at the Grüner Baum, I asked a final question. If you had to leave your home, I said, what would you miss the most?

A silence fell. 

“What would he miss?” Ludwig murmured, the mist outside the window mostly covering the mountain. “What would he miss if he found it dark now, if he had to move away now?”

He looked around him at the room empty of guests. “Just . . . this,” he said, and raised a hand. “Yes. Yes, only this.” The mist caught in the tops of the spruce and spilled over into the village streets. “Just this, the farm where I grew up. I would miss this. Even though I sometimes curse it. I would miss it the most.”

There in Bauhus’s office, a cuckoo springs out of the little house on the wall—that sleek, modern clock, missing the detail of tradition but still gesturing at something. Bauhus apologizes for the interruption. “It is, well, the Black Forest,” he says, and chuckles.

Sitting beneath the cuckoo, listening to the rain roll off the mountains, I wonder. Maybe not too long from now the Black Forest that yielded these clocks, their design and function, will again exist only in the space to which the cuckoo retreats. Or maybe it only ever did.

Kendra Atleework is the author of Miracle Country, which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award and was highlighted by The New York Times’“Books that Explain California.” Her writing has appeared in Best American Essays, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She lives in Germany, where she and her harp can often be found in the forest.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

In this piece, Eli Cugini argues that Pixar’s heyday may have passed, with a once-adventurous studio now seemingly paralyzed by efforts to remain “family friendly.” Focusing on Elio and Inside Out 2, Cugini shows how Pixar tentatively introduces subversive ideas—children wanting escape, resisting rigid gender norms, or expressing complex desires—only to defuse them with reassuring endings that reassert the nuclear family, conformity, and safety.

Like its predecessor, Inside Out 2 is ostensibly about accepting change and uncertainty. Yet Inside Out 2 feels so straitjacketed that the real message seems to be more that surveillance and control are in a child’s best interest. When, in the ending sequence, Anger tells us that Riley sometimes may “do the wrong thing” and that this renders her no less lovable, the illustrative example shown is Riley accidentally breaking a pepper mill. A pepper mill! The it’s-okay-to-have-flaws mega-blockbuster cannot actually afford Riley more than a minimal license to make mistakes. Her climactic error is accidentally knocking over a friend, which the film takes pains to emphasize is accidental; this is a noticeable downgrade in autonomy compared to the still recent Turning Red and Luca, whose protagonists both deliberately betray their friends at points.

In this thought-provoking and inspiring interview at The New York Times on the publication of her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End, prolific author Rebecca Solnit talks with David Marchese about hope as defiance, the political obstacles to real climate action, counternarratives that can lead to positive change, and the pitfalls of incomplete or one-sided storytelling.

Whether it has to do with environmental degradation or degradation of our politics or of people, it seems as if the public is hungry for an individual to be a counterweight to Trump and Trumpism. I don’t know whether that person is Zohran Mamdani or Gavin Newsom, who is clearly trying to position himself that way. But for whatever reason, that person has yet to be identified. Why do you think that is? 

One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war. I denigrate politicians I don’t respect as windsocks. I just want us to understand that most of the important change is collective.

What is the United States doing in (or, really, to) Iran? Critic Patrick Blanchfield situates the bombardment of the country within the long legacy of an American empire that doesn’t care about norms, much less rules, and insists the game will go its way despite ample evidence to the contrary:

Trump is the perfect vehicle, spokesman, and avatar for our late-imperial heedlessness, and at the same time, he clearly represents a continuation and intensification of tendencies that have long been converging in American politics, pushing those tendencies to their logical extreme with all the ruthless dependability of the profit motive itself. What differentiates Trump from his predecessors is his refusal to do what Lacan would call feigning to feign, his total inability to conjure the pretense of at least pretending to publicly care about pretense. Especially in his second term Trump has pushed on without restraint, internal or otherwise, at once lazy and inexorable, leaving everybody else to bemoan norms that no longer apply. The machinery of war is in motion, because it’s been in motion for a long, long time. What else is that machinery supposed to do?

“Dad first told me of his plan to build the world’s largest jewelled egg while perched in the cab of a small digger,” writes Serena Kutchinsky in this edited extract from Kutchinsky’s Egg: A Family Story of Love, Loss & Obsession. But her dad’s obsession with this egg cost the family everything. This is the strange, fascinating tale of what it takes to build—and sell—a giant gold egg. Sometimes you can dream too big.

But after the egg, life was never the same. It came to bear responsibility for the loss of our century-old business, the implosion of my parents’ marriage and Dad’s untimely death. After the family firm was sold, the egg was seized by creditors and locked away. It vanished but its shadow lingered. Mum raged against it as if it were human. A Maleficent-like villain that stole her livelihood and husband, and robbed her children of a father. I was meant to hate it, too. But I couldn’t. Just like I couldn’t hate Dad when he left. Instead, the idea that this shrine to his eccentric, audacious ambition was out there somewhere gnawed away at me.

American journalist Danny Fenster was in Myanmar during the 2021 coup. “I’d wanted to learn from journalists standing up to unimaginable repression,” he writes, but when he arrived in the country, he felt inexperienced and out of place. For a while, Fenster watched events unfold around him on his phone, until he was detained while attempting to board a flight out of the country. Co-created with cartoonist and graphic memoirist Amy Kurzweil, this collaboration at The Verge is a visually engaging and immersive digital reading experience. [Subscription may be required.]

There was a TV in our ward, but programming was limited, and all of it in Burmese anyway.

A Buddhist monk, one of the only English speakers there, told me they used to watch BBC and Discovery Channel. But on the morning of the coup, the TV signal was cut completely.

When it came back on, only state broadcasts remained.

“That’s how we knew the military had taken back control.”

One day, I noticed a prisoner fiddling with something.

The monk explained that for just a few thousand kyat or a handful of betel nuts, guards brought prisoners USB sticks full of Chinese action movies and Bollywood musicals, or TikTok reels of people being kicked in the nuts. Some even had small MP3 players they listened to illegal music on.

l began scheming immediately.

“I grew up in a very Indian California, and it was under almost constant siege by a society habituated to extraction, displacement, and dispossession,” wrote Julian Brave NoiseCat in 2022. “I remember running around the Intertribal Friendship House with a bunch of other snot-nosed Native kids back when the nonprofit was borderline insolvent and the community garden was little more than a sandbox and jungle gym waiting to give you tetanus. The Native Bay Area and California that raised me was pocked with these invisible enclaves of Indian community: filled with love and holding on by a thread.”

NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen, is an Oakland-raised writer, journalist, and filmmaker—the first Indigenous North American filmmaker ever nominated for an Oscar. I wish I had access to writing like his when I was growing up in the Bay Area in the ’80s and ’90s. What I learned about Native culture and history, in both the bay and the US, felt locked away in past tense, in the static pages of history textbooks. NoiseCat’s writing reframes familiar terrain entirely—revealing a postapocalyptic Indigenous perspective on a California and a country that were always there, but never on the pages I was handed.

That perspective is at the heart of NoiseCat’s first book, We Survived the Night, which weaves memoir, Indigenous myth and oral tradition, and reportage. The title comes from tsecwínucw-k—a traditional Secwepemcstin greeting that doesn’t quite translate to “good morning,” but rather to “you survived the night.” For Indigenous people in North America, survival isn’t a metaphor; it’s a lived reality.

We Survived the Night is a bestseller in both Canada and the US, was named a best book across numerous 2025 lists, and is currently a finalist for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. With PEN’s award ceremony on March 31, there’s no better time to add it to your bookshelf.

—Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Where did you grow up?

Oakland, California, during the hyphy movement. I had four copies of E-40’s My Ghetto Report Card and could rap every word.

What places feel like home?

Currently: Oakland, California; Canim Lake, British Columbia; Bremerton, Washington; and Surrey, British Columbia.

Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?

Powwow dancing, the good ol’ hockey game, and Sherman Alexie.

What is your favorite time of day?

Dinner.

What are you really good at?

Telling stories, hopefully?

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?

My first child, a son, who will be born in April.

Describe your favorite meal.

Fish and rice with seaweed and eulachon grease, or really any traditional food, but especially the seafood my Tsimshian in-laws eat.

Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)

The sound of a household full of relatives.

Where do you do your best thinking?

In my truck, or on a run, or in my truck on the run.

What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?

I didn’t grow up with my father, he left when I was little. We reconciled as adults when I decided to move in with him to write my first book, We Survived the Night, and direct my first documentary, Sugarcane, alongside Emily Kassie. Both of those projects were, at their core, about our relationship and reconciliation. I’m really excited to become a dad. My dad was 33 when I was born and I will be 33 when my son comes into the world.

Where do you like to read?

In transit, on the beach, or in my truck in audiobook form.

What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?

I was born in Minnesota, so I was proud to discover that four out of the five Team USA men’s hockey players who skipped the Trump White House visit and State of the Union were also from Minnesota, the “State of Hockey.”

Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.

Witi Ihimaera’s Substack, Sherman Alexie’s Substack, The New Yorker.

What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?

I’ll never forget the first time I read Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”or Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. As someone who has worked exclusively in nonfiction until now, I have so much respect for the writers whose work redefined what this genre could be. I specifically want to shout out my own grandfather, Joe Roddy, lead writer for Look magazine back in the day, who profiled the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould for The New Yorker back in 1960. The piece is called “Apollonian” and it has recently been made available via the magazine’s website.

What was the last book you read?

I’ve been reading and rereading Moby Dick and some other classics: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider. I’m currently a decent way into Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and loving it. Between those novels, I finally got around to Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations: A Millennium of North America, one of the most remarkable works of history I’ve ever read.

What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?

I’m proud of my first book, We Survived the Night, a portrait of contemporary Indigenous life across Canada and the United States that weaves together memoir, family history, and reportage, with a contemporary retelling of the Coyote epic. Indigenous peoples all the way from Central America to Western Canada used to tell stories about the trickster Coyote, who was sent to the earth by Creator to set the world in order, but those stories are now seldom told and have nearly died out among my people and many others. The Coyote Stories have never been taken seriously as nonfiction, even though that is how our own people regard them. I’m proud of the way We Survived the Night pushes the boundaries of nonfiction. And I also think that it’s only right that my first book is my own take on the greatest narrative tradition from my own Indigenous canon.

What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?

Honestly? Get stoned.

Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?

Sherman Alexie’s tragicomic sensibility always did it for me. I’m drawn to Hemingway’s tight prose. The creative ways Hanif Abdurraqib plays with structure liberated my own. Layli Long Soldier does this visually and to the nth degree in her poetry. As a journalist, I learned a lot reading Evan Osnos, who does so much with reported details. I’ve always admired Bill McKibben’s combination of expert yet accessible commentary on perhaps the greatest challenge of our era, climate change. And then you have writers with such distinct style and voice: Tommy Orange, Jia Tolentino, Rebecca Solnit. I’m always blown away by writers like them because what they do is so distinctly them.

What words do you overuse?

In a recent draft: “got.”

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

Eating stuff my stomach can’t actually handle: Szechuan food and milk in all its many delicious forms.

What superpower would you like to have?

It would be pretty sick to fly.

What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?

Coyote.

If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?

Exercise—tennis, hockey, snowboarding, powwow dancing, gym. “Movement is medicine” as they say.

What five items would you place in a time capsule?

Jarred salmon, dried salmon, candied salmon, frozen salmon, salmon with wings (just making sure you’re paying attention).

What does your writing space look like?

I write whenever and wherever I can get it in, honestly. This week: American Airlines seats 8A & F, an Airbnb, Nemesis Coffee, the living room, Alaska Airlines seat 6A, the Mesa Refuge.

Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. He is the first Indigenous North American filmmaker ever nominated for an Academy Award and the first Indigenous North American author to ever write about healing from intergenerational trauma by getting stoned with his dad in the pages of The New York Times Magazine. His first book, We Survived the Night, is a finalist for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

At Texas Monthly, Jeffrey McWhorter shares a different sort of city itinerary: a photo essay documenting a walk across Dallas, from its southernmost border to its northernmost tip. “I’ve always been determined to scrape back the city’s metropolitan veneer and find adventure right here in the in-between spaces of my beloved hometown,” he writes. McWhorter walked 52 miles over two days, and met 231 people. His photographs paint a vibrant portrait of the city, and reveal the connections with strangers—neighbors, really—that he made along the way.

Nowadays I’m mostly content with my ordinary family life—carpool, Home Depot runs, Saturday morning soccer, Sunday morning church—all neatly organized in a carefully Tetris’d schedule. But from time to time the itch returns, and I find myself staring at the Google Maps satellite view of Dallas, zooming in on curiosities and daydreaming about what might be next.

Who killed Frankie Little Jr.? In a follow-up to a 2022 Rolling Stone story, Brenna Ehrlich meets with Richard Jones, a retired journalist who became obsessed with Little’s case and developed a theory: that Little was killed by Samuel Dixon, a convicted serial killer who remains incarcerated and has largely escaped public attention.

A Black man who was convicted in 2003 of murdering and sexually abusing four people, Dixon has been largely ignored by the media, a lapse that could have led to Little’s case going truly cold — that is, if Dixon’s guilty of another murder. I traveled to East Cleveland to meet Jones — and exchanged several letters with a largely unknown serial killer — to see if the former journalist’s theory has weight. What I found adds another layer of horror to an already tragic story.

Throughout this nerve-racking reconstruction of a decades-old school shooting, Dylan Alphenaar, a student journalist at Cornell University, is attuned to small, devastating details. During a reporting trip to Low Rise 7, where a half-dozen students were held at gunpoint and two roommates, Young Hee Suh and Erin Nieswand, were murdered, Alphenaar and a friend simply talk their way into a building without ID. “It turns out, it is about as easy to enter the dorm as it was 42 years ago,” writes Alphenaar. A sharp piece of reporting that doubles as a plea against forgetting.

In the past few months, I asked several of my friends if they had heard of this tragedy. Almost every person I asked knew next to nothing. They had either never heard of it or were only vaguely aware of the details. If they had any information at all, it was largely inaccurate. In historical newspapers and even court records, it is constantly confused that Kim and Young Hee were dating or that Kim was a “spurned lover.” If my friends knew anything about this tragedy, it was through this lens. But this is a cruel misrepresentation of the facts. Kim was an obsessed stalker who harassed a teenage girl before killing her and her roommate.

Charlie McCann rides along as Ran Fowler, a California nursery owner and plant sneak, travels to Mexico to gather seeds and cuttings from a dozen different kinds of succulent and then sneak them back across the US border. McCann’s tense narrative carries an engaging history of plant theft, and is barbed, here and there, fun writing. (“Strolling through a desert landscape is like inhabiting Salvador Dali’s brain.”) And Fowler makes a great subject: an obsessive whose reverence for succulents falls somewhere between righteousness and delusion.

Fowler was in his early 30s when his then-girlfriend planted a “depressing” strip of earth outside his apartment with succulents as a birthday present. Before this, he hadn’t been interested in plants. When he was a kid, his mother had dragged him to botanical gardens, which he wrote off as zoos without animals. But when he saw the succulents outside his apartment he was blown away by their shapes. He remembers looking at a D. pachyphytum and thinking, “how is this a plant?” The succulents “pulled me down this rabbit hole”. He quit his job as a social worker and began working at a botanical garden. Eventually he opened his own nursery. His personal collection of succulents now exceeds 10,000 plants.

For many people allergic to pollen, spring can be both beautiful and dreadful. But for Ana Maria Cox, experiencing cedar fever in Texas, caused by Ashe juniper trees, has instead been grounding, giving her a sense of place. “[C]edar convinced me to move back home,” Cox writes. “I was a little lost, and when you’re lost, discomfort can orient you in space.” Her essay, part of Texas Highways’ Open Road series, is a lovely read on scent, home, and belonging.

You can fake an accent, buy a pair of cowboy boots, adopt a football team, feign a favorite taco truck, appropriate “y’all,” and complain about Californians—while stepping in front of your own license plate. But the allergic reaction to cedar pollen is both involuntary and impossible to simulate. The only thing up to you is how much you complain.

A powerful February storm triggered California’s deadliest avalanche in modern history, killing nine of 15 backcountry skiers traveling from the Frog Lake huts near Lake Tahoe. Joshua Partlow carefully and tactfully picks through the decisions and route choices that may have contributed to this tragedy amid forecast high avalanche danger. With an investigation underway, it is still too early for definitive answers, but not for the hard questions.

Two weeks after this tragedy, the guides’ decisions—to ski through a blizzard; to travel a risky route—remain the mystery at its center, as law enforcement and the wider community look for answers. The Nevada County sheriff’s office and California’s workplace-safety agency are investigating potential safety violations or criminal negligence by Blackbird. Zeb Blais, the owner of Blackbird, has offered condolences in a statement, but he has not otherwise spoken publicly. (His company referred questions to a public–relations firm that did not respond to requests for comment.) Blais himself has skied and guided in Alaska and Antarctica, Japan and the Himalayas; in a podcast a couple of years ago, while describing how guides monitor avalanche conditions, he allowed that “there’s just a certain degree of uncertainty that we just can’t eliminate.”

We’ve all experienced flights through some pockets of fitful air; less commonly have we endured the sort of disturbance that rises to the official level of “moderate.” But the more global temperatures rise, and the more widespread “clear-air turbulence” becomes, the more likely it is that we’ll hit the sort of bumps we’ll tell people about later. For The New Yorker, Burkhard Bilger sets out to find the jounciest flights he can, and to help us all understand why the air up there is getting so restless.

Thanks to decades of such refinements, today’s jets may be the world’s most reliable machines. Flying in them is less likely to kill you than walking on staircases.

It’s the sky that’s grown more unreliable. Fierce storms and erratic winds are increasingly common with climate change. But the rise in clear-air turbulence, often far from storms and undetectable by radar, is especially alarming. Since 1979, clear-air turbulence has increased by as much as fifty-five per cent over the North Atlantic and forty-one per cent over the United States. If temperatures continue to rise unabated, it could more than double by the middle of the century. Death by turbulence is still vanishingly rare, but Flight SQ321 did have one fatality. Geoffrey Kitchen, a retired insurance salesman from Bristol, England, on holiday with his wife of fifty years, died before the plane landed. Its sudden plunge had come as such a shock, it seems, that it gave him a heart attack.

“I’d become a teacher in large part because I wanted to spend time with young people’s writing, honouring it with close attention,” writes Peter C Baker in this piece for The Guardian. But what happens when writing—and even reading—without the help of AI becomes a foreign concept in the classroom? This topic is not new, but Baker’s passion for creating AI-free teaching is inspiring.

Emily’s students all had school-issued laptops, and her computer had a program that allowed her to surveil the content of every one of her students’ screens; they all appeared on the screen simultaneously, in a grid that recalled a bank of CCTV monitors. Using this program was always discomfiting – Big Brother, c’est moi – and always transfixing. Some students didn’t use AI at all, at least in class. Others turned to it every chance they got, feeding in whatever question they were working on almost as a reflex. At least one student was in the habit of putting every new subject into ChatGPT, having it generate notes that he could refer to if called on. Often, I saw students getting funnelled toward AI use even when they hadn’t necessarily been looking for it. I got used to watching a student Google a subject (“key themes in Romeo and Juliet”), read the AI-generated answer that now appears atop most Google search results, click “Dive deeper in AI mode” – and suddenly be chatting with Gemini, Google’s chatbot, which was always ready to advertise its own capabilities. “Should I elaborate on one or more of these themes? Should I draft a first paragraph for an essay on the subject?”

What do Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, Kris Jenner’s facelift, Martha Stewart’s cloned dogs, and Jurassic World: Rebirth have in common? Patrick R. Crowley, who draws on these cultural events and more for a provocative essay on whether our “pursuit of realism . . . is offering a set of diminishing returns” in the era of AI slop. Read this one slowly, and prepare yourself to open some tabs, so you can take optimal pleasure in the range of Crowley’s mind.

HEADING SOUTH on the 101 through downtown San Francisco, drivers are bombarded by a series of billboards for tech companies filled with contemptuously inscrutable slogans like “Got GPU?” or “Don’t SOC-block your best engineer.” Most of them advertise corporate products like “agentive AI workflows” that have in turn spawned a new cottage industry for the detection or discernment of AI-generated content. One of these, which for several years now has shown various iterations of hot dogs juxtaposed with dachshunds dressed up as hot dogs, had a refreshingly lucid, if dystopian, tagline for its content moderation services (for platforms, not users): “Can’t tell what’s real? We can help.” If only it were that easy.

In this edition: Eschatolgy, Texas style; dancing like nobody’s watching; the men, they myths, the legends; monumental responses; and notes fit for a King.

The story of five red heifers sent from Texas to Israel may seem simple, but it is mired in deep-rooted issues. These cows represent evangelical Christian end-times theology, Jewish religious aspirations, and volatile Middle East politics centered on the Temple Mount. Andrew Logan is a worthy guide through the complexities of their journey, shaping an engaging, accessible essay that makes sense of an improbable subject—an impressive feat.

We sat together at a table in his office, and Stinson told me the story of how he became obsessed with the red heifer. He grew up in a loving, working-class family in Glen Rose. Both of his parents were truck drivers, and they often left Byron alone for weeks on end. By the time he was a teenager, Byron, already consumed by his faith, had accepted Jesus as his savior once, been baptized twice, and read the Bible three times. One evening in 1969, when Byron was fourteen, he sat on his bed inside a muggy six-by-nine-foot
storage shed outside the camper trailer where he lived with his mother and adoptive father. As he pored over the book of Romans in his worn copy of
the King James Bible, the words of Paul the Apostle seemed to leap off the page: “For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: Who are Israelites.” Paul wrote that he would surrender his own salvation if it meant the Israelites would accept Jesus; Byron felt overwhelmed with an urge to follow Paul’s example. Then Stinson heard voices.