Courtesy of Jake Lancaster.

When Alex Pretti was shot ten times in South Minneapolis on a cold but sunny Saturday morning in front of a doughnut shop, I was likely three or four miles away, speeding down I-94 to make it to the airport before my wife’s flight to Florida. She was surprising her sister, who was turning fifty. It was well below zero and we were all very cranky, and running late. My son and daughter were in the back seat. We passed the Basilica of Saint Mary on the left, the Walker Art Center on the right. From the freeway you can see Claes Oldenburg’s iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture. I told the kids to look, but the novelty had worn off over the years: it was just a big cherry in a spoon, decorative and somewhat obscene. We passed under a pedestrian bridge designed by an architect who commissioned John Ashbery to write a poem for it. The poem is called “untitled bridge poem” and is stenciled across the structure’s steel girders and ends with the line (in what I’ve always thought to be a satisfying anti-epiphany) “And then it got very cool.” There’s a tunnel after the bridge, and everyone holds their breath until we make it through.

I know my way around Minneapolis. I’ve lived here for two decades, in North Minneapolis, in Uptown, Downtown, Northeast, and South Minneapolis, and now in a near north suburb, but I still use Google Maps because there’s more than one way to the airport and there’s always road construction and unforeseen traffic and, for the past couple of weeks, the possibility of a protest or march or ICE activity blocking a major thoroughfare. Machine learning can predict these things. Most human citizens who aren’t on Signal chats or ICE watch group text threads cannot. Read More

Photograph by Krista Diamond.

The white lines on the dirt football field were fresh, but by halftime they would be barely visible. It was homecoming weekend in Trona, an isolated community established in 1912 as a company town for the Searles Valley Minerals plant, which first opened as a potash plant before expanding into mining several other minerals, including borax, sodium sulfate, and soda ash.

These days, the plant is still in operation, but there are fewer jobs and therefore fewer people. Trona is geographically close to the border of Death Valley but ninety-seven miles from the touristy part of it, which means you wouldn’t necessarily pass through it or even learn of its existence if you visited the national park. I worked at a hotel in Death Valley for years and went to Trona only once during that time; a Blogspot-era photo essay had told me that its residents had all left mysteriously and simultaneously, which is not true. But I saw it as empty when I got there, because I was projecting some sinister stereotype—probably The Hills Have Eyes—onto its quiet streets, which is the exact kind of orientation a lot of people have toward the desert. Someone at work had told me that the high school’s football team played on the only dirt field in the United States. Read More

All photographs by Oliver Egger.

Just as the sun begins to peek over the flat horizon of Coon Rapids, Iowa, 1,383 pigeons fill the sky. The birds pour out as a single winged mass from the rows of flung-open coops on the transport truck. They rise and circle higher into the morning air. Strong gusts from the south-southwest soon scatter them into hundreds of solitary black dots across the slabs of clouds.

They could fly anywhere. They could head north to go swimming in the cool rush of the Middle Raccoon River. Go southwest to inspect the quality of lampposts in Omaha. Or simply land on and rest in one of the maples below. But each pigeon, as if pulled by a magnet, turns due east. They flap their wings as fast as they can until they disappear over the horizon—all heading toward Chicago, all heading home.

Or so I heard. While the pigeons were being released on that morning of Friday, October 17, in a field in west-central Iowa, I was nearly four hundred miles away, sitting in a dinky Sheraton Hotel near O’Hare Airport for the board meeting of the annual convention of the American Racing Pigeon Union (ARPU). The ARPU is the largest pigeon-racing organization in America, with 6,650 members, but this summit on expanding vaccine accessibility for their birds, boosting youth participation, and updating pigeon tracking software was before an audience of no more than fifteen, which, as one hour became two, dropped to a die-hard five.

As a man in a USA trucker hat rose to ask the board about their pigeon lobbyist (yes, even they have one), the hundreds of airborne pigeons were locking on to the exact coordinates of the home lofts—scattered in backyards and garages within a fifty-mile radius of this hotel—where they had been raised. As they soared over cube-cut farmland, scanning for hawks with their orange eyes, they had no idea that fifty thousand dollars were at stake, that the humans that raised them were anxiously waiting for them to swoop in, or that they were competitors in the convention’s main event: the yearly ARPU combine. No, they were just trying to get home.

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Photograph by David Schurman Wallace.

The old people are going apeshit for the mariachis. My dad and I are sitting on a bench in the plaza at the bottom of the hill, killing time before the next play. We were hoping to do a little reading, but then, under the light of a half moon shaded by trees, the musicians appeared and started playing a promotion for the reopening of a nearby Mexican restaurant. A crowd appeared from thin air: the ranks of the silver-haired and still-fit, the perennial window-shoppers of this cultural oasis, who show more enthusiasm for this advertisement than for any of the Shakespeare plays we’ve been to so far. They take a lot of pictures on their phones of the brass-buttoned musicians, who put in their work. They try to clap along. A couple even dances for a song or two: a dip, a twirl, more applause. Romance never dies—its definition only degrades.

For several years when I was growing up, my family drove to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In Ashland, the main drag of olde-time, small-town storefronts fold into the surround of rolling evergreen hills; an actual babbling brook, complete with footbridge, runs through it. Ashland is a certain kind of cultural haven for those who mute their wealth tastefully under their shawls. With a complex of three theaters at its heart, it hosts a ninety-year-old institution dedicated to spreading the word of the Bard all summer long. As a child, I was always soothed sitting in the darkness, where everything felt perfectly in order. One scene stitched into the next, the actors hit their lines, and together we headed toward marriage or death.

It began as a nostalgia trip. My parents hadn’t been since before the pandemic, and for me it had been even longer. A combination of COVID and wildfires had threatened to bankrupt the festival, so we agreed it was time to both support and take stock. And my parents are getting older—who knows if we’ll ever do it again. On our drive, we see the dead skeletons of trees still left after the burning, with new greenery coming up in their shadows. Read More