Amy Janik has a passion for winged creatures, which is how her professional career shifted from birds to insects in the order Odonata—dragonflies and damselflies. In this episode, we go deep into their world. After Amy describes how she got interested in dragonflies and damselflies, she offers a few tips about how to tell
John A. Logan grew up in a well-to-do household in Murphysboro, Illinois, in the years before the Civil War. He had political ambitions early, maybe even from the moment he took his first breath, but the trajectory of his career took some remarkable turns. In this episode, I talk with Betsy Brown and Laura
Aaron Brown is a writer, teacher, and lifelong resident of the Mesabi Iron Range, an area that has produced an enormous share of the iron ore that built America and won two world wars. In this episode, we take a look at the Iron Ranges of Minnesota with Aaron Brown as our guide. Aaron
Some people have the outdoors in their blood. Will Collins is one of them. From the time he attended his first summer camp as a child, he felt drawn to the outdoors. In this episode, I talk with Will about his path from childhood summer camps in Wisconsin to multi-week expeditions in remote areas.
Did a 70-foot-long river behemoth really lurk in the river’s channel in the 1870s? Are there monsters in the river’s depths that have eluded us so far? In this episode, we delve deep into the Mississippi’s murky waters and mystical swamps to uncover stories about the terrifying creatures that we have imagined prowl the
Very few people today have any memory of a relatively free-flowing Mississippi River. The scale and persistence of river engineering is staggering, and for many of us, the engineered Mississippi is the only Mississippi we have known. That’s one reason journalist Boyce Upholt’s new book is so important. In The Great River: The Making
