STORY BY LAURA JACQUOTTET
“Mum, are we nearly there?” we whine for the five-hundredth time. A tired car, and an even more tired dad, turns off the main road and attacks the last leg of the journey along narrower and narrower high-hedged country lanes down to the familiar holiday home on the rugged coastline of England’s Cornwall.
CURATED BY CAITLIN WOODWARD
Third-culture kids—non-Senegalese teenagers growing up in Senegal—aim their lenses around their city, transporting us into the scenes of Senegal they know as high school students in Dakar, the capital of this West African country.
STORY AND PHOTO BY MARINA GROSS-HOY
The headline of my local newspaper’s weekend edition was literally: “I do not have good news.”
It was a quote from Quebec’s premier at a press conference about new measures responding to rising COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
STORY BY HEATHER M. SURLS
PHOTOS BY ISABELLE BERNARD & HEATHER M. SURLS
Outside the northern Jordanian city of Ajloun, I sat cross-legged in Wael Rabadi’s olive grove, stripping ripe olives from just-pruned branches. Looking up from the work in my hands, I could see olive trees and oaks, grapevines and stone walls blanketing the hills in all directions. Eighteen hundred years ago, Rabadi’s ancestors owned this whole area, including the prominent hilltop behind me crowned by the centuries-old Ajloun Castle.
STORY AND IMAGES BY EJ BOWMAN
La Nonna’s name was Jone Corti then. Jo-ne. It slid off the tongue like a berry gelato. It
was strange to burden a young Italian girl with a Greek name, especially one that referred so specifically to Ionia and the adjacent sea. It annoyed me when her biddy friends mispronounced it, suffering the harsh J instead of the more lithe Y. p>
A VIDEO REPORT BY BILL DIEM
This happens when I have been alone too long—the words start to leak out of everything and they will not stop. I cannot look around, I cannot take a single step, without it becoming prose, and it is not welcome. It thrusts me into a place where language imposes this acute separation between me and everything else—leaks its ink out of the bark, the pavement, the sky, flowing directly from itself to me in the form of a stream of words, and it will not let me rest.
STORY AND PHOTO BY C. VANO
Some aspects of life really are the same, regardless of geography. My hairdresser’s shop feels like the Albanian version of Steel Magnolias, with women dropping in and back out again, mostly just stopping to chat or help themselves to my hairdresser’s tools and beauty supplies.
WORDS AND PHOTO BY JC JOHNSON
$10,000 goal: Click. Refresh. $340.
One winter day, I was walking my dog when my neighbor invited me to sled with her and her friends. “Don’t worry, we are all over 30 and from the neighborhood, so take a turn. I’ll hold your dog’s leash while you go.” I was so excited to have a snow day and to finally have some pandemic-era human interaction, along with the chance to live my inner child.
STORY BY JOANNA MARSH
Throughout the past year, I have wondered how “that woman” is doing. I don’t know her name, but I can see her face clearly in my mind: the brown eyes under thick eyebrows, the sharp nose, her black hair pulled back in a French braid.
I saw her regularly at the Washington, D.C., area gym where I worked out. She was chatty with the other women in the ladies’ locker room, often dominating the conversation. She cornered me once and asked whether I would take her into my house as a renter. She would be a good roommate, she said. Unobtrusive and tidy and responsible. Politely, I replied that I would let her know if I heard of anyone looking for roommates. She also worked in the childcare room at the gym, but my 6-year-old son didn’t like her and refused to come to the gym with me if she was going to be there. Was she mean? I asked. No, he replied, she just completely ignores us.Read More »
STORY BY PETE SHERRY
In June 2019, at the age of 43, I was diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer. I underwent colon resection surgery and eight months of chemotherapy, and was then declared “cancer free” in the early spring of 2020.
