Tracy K. Smith’s Civic Vision
The U.S. poet laureate on her new edited collection and how literature can mend a fractured civic culture.
Introduction to In The Watershed: A Journey Down The Maumee River
The Maumee River does not begin.
A ‘Toxic Tour’ of the Whiting Refinery on the Shores of Lake Michigan
One Saturday in June, I drove around the southern edge of Lake Michigan with Thomas Frank, an activist from East Chicago, Indiana, looking for oil. We had met a few weeks previous, at a conference put on by the Freshwater Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Frank was on a panel about oil pipelines.
The Oil Pipelines Putting the Great Lakes at Risk
Two hundred feet below the surface of the Straits of Mackinac, oil is moving through the Great Lakes.
Family Bones
My great-grandfather was nearly 60 years old when he dug a basement in his backyard and built part of a house on top of it.