It is not hard to climb to the highest point in Illinois, unless we are accounting for tedium. Charles Mound (elevation 1,235 feet) is on private property, and open to the public only a handful of weekends a year—including, to my good fortune, the Saturday […]
Angela Maxwell for Outside Online
On May 2, 2014, with $12,000 saved, Angela Maxwell left her best friend’s home in Bend, Oregon, to start a five-year walk around the world. There’s no pre-approved path for the small ranks of pedestrian circumnavigators, the dozen or so people who’ve claimed they’ve walked around the […]
Susan Miller Runs My Life for a Month for Cosmo
Susan Miller runs my life for Cosmo: Fact: 2019 was not working out. One week into January — in a move ripped from Legally Blonde — my boyfriend broke up with me (by email) instead of proposing (in person). Two days later, a scamster emptied my […]
The Holidays for Man Repeller
“Halloween comes earlier every year” is a thing we say with all the regularity of Halloween itself. In part this is because of how time collapses: The 12 months between my first Halloween (costume choice: bumblebee) and my second (tomato) equaled 100 percent of my lifetime. […]
The Philadelphia Eagles for InsideHook
In the last photo I have of my father, he and my mother are watching the Eagles play the Bears last November. My father, carefully buttoned into a light-blue shirt, waves toward the camera. Someone who had not known him — who did not know […]
Jeopardy for Man Repeller
Tonight, Jeopardy will crown the winner of its Tournament of Champions. Everyone knows it will likely be James Holzhauer—or else Emma Boettcher, who in June ended Holzhauer’s 32-game winning streak. The key moment, though, has already come: On Monday’s show, instead of writing an answer to the […]
Hong Kong for the Wall Street Journal
NAMED FOR THE STORES of sandalwood incense that once perfumed its export docks, Hong Kong—that is, “fragrant harbor”—remains an intoxicating meeting place of East and West. British forces raised the Union Jack over Possession Point in 1841 during the First Opium War, fought to protect the […]
Hemispheres Magazine Iceland Cover Story
Not long ago, Iceland was a spectacularly beautiful but seldom visited wonderland of waterfalls, volcanoes, and geysers in the lonely North Atlantic, still finding its national feet after centuries of Danish and Norwegian rule. Then, an unlikely confluence of events: The economic crisis of […]
