The Search for Extraterrestrial Life as We Don’t Know It

The search for life on other planets has been based on what we already know. But what if extraterrestrial life does not look like any beings we’re used to on Earth? It may even be unrecognizable to the scientists searching for it. In this essay, Sarah Scoles meets Sarah Stewart Johnson, who has been looking for “aliens” from a different perspective.

Even when scientists do discover biology unfamiliar to them, they tend to relate it to something familiar. For instance, when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek saw single-celled organisms through his microscope’s compound lens in the 17th century, he dubbed them “animalcules,” or little animals, which they are not.

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In a Famed Kenyan Game Park, the Animals Are Giving Up

Once a wildlife paradise, Amboseli National Park in Kenya has become a wasteland. For Undark, journalist Georgina Gustin and documentary photographer Larry C. Price document the stark and deadly conditions that animals at Amboseli have endured the past several years, caused by climate change-fueled drought. In addition to a parched and drastically changing environment, conflicts between herders and farmers and an increase in illegal poaching have contributed to an already dire situation. For some readers, Price’s photographs may be hard to look at. Gustin’s on-the-ground reporting, however, is essential.

The park draws tens of thousands of tourists a year and is a major economic engine for the region. Now these tourists pop their heads through the roofs of safari trucks, or sit inside, jabbing at their phones and looking blankly out the window, wondering how the trip of a lifetime turned into a vigil.

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How to Keep a Great Magazine Going

On the occasion of Texas Monthly‘s 50th anniversary, writer Stephen Harrigan looks back at his own milestone with the magazine, and in the process delivers a stirring reminder of what brought so many into the longform journalism fold. You report and write for the reader, yes, but every story is a crucial experience — and one that begets its own tributary.

The monthly editorial meetings represented, for me, a magic door opening to an unknown future. What story would I be assigned? Where would it take me? Who would I meet? There were stories that I reported by phone from inside my house, others that deposited me in the empty middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, or in the suffocating botanical abundance of the Big Thicket, or in the operating room with Denton Cooley, or a world away with a Dallas disaster consultant in the rain forests of Madagascar. Every magazine piece led to new interests, new expertise, ideas for more articles, and even sometimes a branching path to a new career. My first two novels were incubated in stories I wrote for Texas Monthly, and so was the first screenplay I sold. 

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In 1848, an enslaved couple fled to Boston in one of history’s most daring escapes

The Crafts, a married couple in Macon, Georgia, fled bondage in plain sight: she disguised as a white man, he as her slave. In a riveting excerpt from her new book, Master Slave Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo documents their flight:

As dawn began to break, the station filled with travelers bound for Savannah. Ensconced quietly in the only car where a Black man was supposed to sit, William carried the cottage key and a pass. And he, or perhaps Ellen, carried a pistol. On this morning, William had to hope that they would not need to use it. He himself had resolved to kill or be killed, rather than be captured.

Traffic at the station thinned as travelers crowded about the train, ready to board. They said their goodbyes. For enslaved riders, this may have been the last time they would see the faces of loved ones, if their loved ones even had permission to see them off.

With the engine fed and the water tank full, the conductor made his final calls. William dared to peek outside. Linked to him, he knew, if only by way of rickety clasps between the cars, was Ellen, who by this time should have been seated in first class. It would be difficult for William to see her before the train stopped. But briefly, William could glimpse the ticket booth, where Ellen, as his master, would have purchased two tickets.

Instead of his wife, he saw another familiar figure hurrying up to the ticket window. His heart dropped. The man interrogated the ticket seller, then pushed his way through the crowd on the platform, with purpose. It was William’s employer — not his legal enslaver, but another white man who “rented” William’s labor in a cabinet shop. This man, who had known William since childhood, scanned the throng as he approached the cars.

The cabinetmaker was coming for him.

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The Incredible Story of Finding My Brother in My 60s

“DNA is the gift that keeps on giving, whether you’re ready or not,” writes Dorothy Ellen Palmer. Palmer and her half-brother, Don Doiron, were born a week apart in 1955, in the same hospital, to different mothers: Florence McLean and Ana Cifuentes. It took 62 years before they learned that they were half-siblings, and were adopted into very different families. Palmer pens a poignant personal essay about searching for the truth, their buried family history in a time when “silence ruled” and “adoption was never discussed,” and their birth father. It’s a moving story about finding one’s place in the world.

Even as adults, adoptees have long been treated like children who need to be protected from our own truths. When we came of age in the 1970s, Don and I had to apply for the scant details, called non-identifying information, the government then permitted us to know. We received sparse biographies of our birth mothers (age, birthplace, education and occupation) and next to nothing about our birth fathers. It wasn’t enough for either of us.

Today, Don and I are still piecing together our stories. Not everything we’ve learned has been happy. Some of our shared history is heart-rending. But we claim every bit of our lives as our truth, as the story we have every right to know, to celebrate and to mourn, to pass on to our children.

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Parting the Waters

“I call my cousin who lives in Crosbyton to find out what it looks like now and if people still swim there,” writes Bobby Alemán. “I ask him if there are still waterfalls. He laughs.”

Silver Falls, once an idyllic swimming hole and recreation spot for families in Texas, no longer exists. But why did the waterfalls go dry? Alemán went back home to investigate why, and on the trip unexpectedly uncovers memories of his father, who died in 2005 at age 50.

She struggles to put words together to tell me about a separate incident involving my father. It turns out my dad once saved a drowning child at Silver Falls. He pulled a 6- or 7-year-old boy out of the water and performed CPR. The boy’s parents were hysterical. Screaming. “They were sure he was gone,” she says. “He just pulled the boy out, right?” I say, puzzled. “No! Your dad brought the boy back,” my aunt emphasizes. “He was as limp as can be.”

I’d never heard this story, but it didn’t surprise me. My grandfather tells me a similar story from many years ago about my dad spotting an injured hiker stranded on a ravine, most likely in the Guadalupe Mountains, when he and his girlfriend were on their way to Mexico for a trip. He was able to flag down help and get aid to the woman. My dad died in 2005 at the age of 50—too young. But since he’s been gone, his stories keep finding their way to me.

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“Monorail!” How Conan O’Brien Came Up With an Iconic ‘Simpsons’ Episode

When a show creates and airs more than 740 episodes of television, finding consensus about the best of those episodes is nearly impossible. Yet, 30 years after it first aired, The Simpsons‘ “Marge vs. the Monorail” might be closest to the crown. This piece from Alan Siegel isn’t the first time an outlet has examined the episode’s impact — see Vice‘s oral history from 2020 — but it gleefully dives into the origin and execution the way few others have. D’ohnt skip it.

The episode was the first true extravaganza for a groundbreaking animated series that was originally conceived as an intimate family comedy. Both visually and narratively, it was an installment that expanded the world of The Simpsons as it moved beyond its first few seasons. All the quotable lines, sight gags, pop culture references, ambitious set pieces, and catchy songs add up to something unexpectedly (and eternally) prescient. The episode is now synonymous with modern hucksterism: Whenever a fancy new transportation system, or a billion-dollar eyesore, or a deal that enriches corporate executives and few others comes along, it can’t escape comparisons to Lanley’s genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail. “I get a kick out of the cultural reach of The Simpsons,” says television writer and producer Jeff Martin, who had a hand in making “Marge vs. the Monorail.” “Now if there’s some shorthand for a dishonest salesman, a flimflam man, it’s a monorail salesman.”

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