Rivers are hard to understand. I grew up in southern New Mexico about a mile from the Rio Grande. As a child, I didn’t think about where the river came from or where it was going. There were many ditches in my town, a capillary system branching off from the river, and it never occurred to me that it was anything less than an unmitigated good to drain a river for irrigation. The infrastructure of hydraulic engineering was so ubiquitous that it created significant distortions in my ability to...| Life & Letters Magazine
Imagine the following scenario: Your neighbor asks you to help them with some yard work and, because you can’t think of an excuse fast enough, you agree. It’s a tedious and sweaty endeavor, but when it’s over the neighbor thanks you and gives you some money for your trouble. When you meet up with a friend that evening, they ask how your day went. Are you more likely to describe the experience as fun if your neighbor rewarded you with five dollars or with a hundred dollars? Think before ...| Life & Letters Magazine
The world’s therapy capital isn’t Los Angeles, where celebrities like Kieran Culkin and Merritt Wever shout out their therapists during awards shows, or New York. Instead that honor belongs to Buenos Aires, where Argentina’s 222 psychologists per 100,000 people (compared to just 30 per 100,000 in the United States, according to the World Health Organization) have created a culture in which therapy isn’t just normalized — it’s practically required. | Life & Letters Magazine
Brenda Boonabaana grew up about 20km from the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, a sprawling habitat for endangered mountain gorillas in southwestern Uganda, near the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bwindi was designated a national park and achieved protected status in the early 1990s and has since become a major source of tourism revenue for Uganda.| Life & Letters Magazine
You probably know the signs of hoarding: detritus in the yard or driveway, curtains or blinds pushed up against the windows. You may even have a hoarder in your family. But according to assistant professor of Italian studies Rebecca Falkoff, what you don’t know about hoarding is, well, a lot of stuff.| Life & Letters Magazine
Brian Hurley’s first exposure to Japanese studies, as a kid in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri, was somewhat serendipitous. When he was in junior high school, a local summer program offered a six-week Japanese language class, taught by a university student. “One thing about growing up in a college town is you’re exposed to folks who are studying all sorts of things,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting.’ So I went.” He continued studying the language in high s...| Life & Letters Magazine
Jennifer Wilks began her newest book project with a seemingly simple question: “Why are there so many adaptations of Carmen set in African diasporic contexts?”| Life & Letters Magazine
If classicist Andrew M. Riggsby had to give a speech about his dog Elmer — an extensive rousing one that he’d need to recall without effort or external aid — he would first visualize the strip mall near where he lives. | Life & Letters Magazine
