Category: Journalism
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Glacier prayer
YOU’VE got to hand it to the Catholic church, sometimes its methods work. In 1678, the inhabitants of Fiesch in the Swiss canton of Valais, exasperated with the glaciers that loomed ever larger over their village, swallowing up their pasturage, inaugurated an annual pilgrimage. The hope was to banish the ice forms with chants, prayers…
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The underhand ape
IN 2004, Benjamin Olken visited a road-building project in rural Indonesia. There was just one small section missing – a bridge over a stream – but the money had run out because of embezzlement, and construction abandoned. “By the time I got there, you could see where the road had been cleared and built, but…
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God-loving linguists
IN 1963 Barbara and Joseph Grimes sat down with their Huichol neighbours to discuss what to do about the bandits terrorising their remote community. It was clear to everyone that the Grimes themselves were the problem. Seeing Americans living there, at the southern tip of the Rocky Mountains, the bandits assumed the community was rich.…
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Dreampond revisited
OLE Seehausen didn’t expect to find much when he dropped his trawling net into Lake Victoria in 1991. The fish he was studying, called cichlids, had been disappearing from the East African lake for years. So he was astounded when he hauled in dozens of them. Close inspection of their coloration and shapes revealed five…
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The fine print
THE terrorist explosions that ripped through Madrid’s crowded commuter trains on the morning of 11 March 2004 killed 191 people, wounded some 2,000 more and prompted an international manhunt for the perpetrators. Soon after, Spanish investigators searching the area near one of the blasts discovered an abandoned set of detonator caps inside a plastic bag…
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Identifying humans
WITH the construction of the railways in the 19th century, a new sociological phenomenon was born: the travelling criminal. Until then, police had relied on local communities to recognise a bad apple in their midst, but now the felons were on the move, wreaking havoc in communities which had no knowledge of their past and…
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Charles Sabine’s battle
IN 1996, an NBC war reporter and his crew were captured by a renegade platoon of mujahideen guerrillas near the Bosnian town of Doboj. As the sun set and the call to prayer went up, the reporter stared at a blood-spattered wall while a young warrior pulled the pin from a grenade, replaced it with…
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Anthony Allison, unsung hero
SIXTY years ago, a young graduate was kicking his heels in Oxford, waiting to embark on his medical studies, when he was invited to join an expedition to a country he knew well. Kenya was his childhood home, but this would be more than a nostalgia trip for him. His head stuffed with new-fangled notions…
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H.M.
EACH time Suzanne Corkin met H.M. during one of his visits to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she would ask him if they had met before. He would smile and say yes, and when she asked him where he would reply, “In high school.” They did not actually meet until he was in his late…
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Wanda
I MET Wanda (pronounced Vanda) in late 2003, a year before she became my mother-in-law. She was nearly 80 and her mind was as sharp as a scalpel. Behind her glasses, her pale-blue eyes sparkled with intelligence. She disliked sentimentality but was a sucker for beauty, and would gaze in rapture at the ice-dancing on…