You can play the ukulele, learn photography or record a song in a top-flight studio. You can also check out a book By Richard Grant Photographs by Ariel Cobbert The Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, a building of pale concrete and greenish glass, rises four stories in midtown Memphis. Walking through its automatic doors on a weekday…
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By Richard Grant Photographs by Pete McBride The ancient Japanese art of brewing a fragrant alcoholic drink from rice is being reinterpreted by Atsuo Sakurai in an unlikely setting In the old Route 66 town of Holbrook, Arizona, close to the Navajo reservation and far from anywhere else, a 41-year-old man named Atsuo Sakurai is making the…
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BY RICHARD GRANT; PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON VARNEY SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | July/August 2021 I first heard about Val Shively—a legendary figure among serious record collectors—from a friend of mine in Philadelphia named Aaron Levinson. He’s a Grammy-winning music producer, composer, DJ and rare vinyl collector who has been buying records from Shively for 40 years. “He has a store…
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Nearly a century after the last wolf was eradicated in the state, a lone female arrived and established a pack. Not everyone is cheering BY RICHARD GRANT; PHOTOGRAPHS BY MORGAN HEIM At a steady trot, wolves can go 20 miles without breaking stride and cover 50 miles in a day. Their long thin legs move with…
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After 14 summers excavating in Yellowstone National Park, Doug MacDonald has a simple rule of thumb. “Pretty much anywhere you’d want to pitch a tent, there are artefacts,” he says, holding up a 3,000-year-old obsidian projectile point that his team has just dug out of the ground. “Like us, Native Americans liked to camp on…
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On swaggering exaggerations and crowing overstatements, on drum beats and tweets and paragraph-long diatribes. From the Mississippi Delta to Trump Tower, Richard Grant writes a history of American grandstanding, eloquence and excess In west London, where I grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the idea of boasting about yourself was almost unthinkable.…
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Through the window of a small plane, I look out over the vastness of the Yukon Territory—an area bigger than California with only 33,000 residents. It’s an austere landscape of glaciated mountain ranges, frozen lakes, ice fields and spruce forests. Then the mountains are behind us, and there are low hills and tundra to the…
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When the Socialist Revolution Came to Oklahoma—and Was Crushed Dead. Ted Eberle, 68, a solid, rough-hewn man in a canvas vest and camouflage cap, drives the gravel back roads of southeast Oklahoma in a pickup truck that smells of deer meat. Speaking in a twanging drawl, he tells story after story about the area—killings are…
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John Steinbeck’s Epic Ocean Voyage Rewrote the Rules of Ecology. It was the fourth sinking of its long career, and this time the old wooden fishing boat lay submerged for nearly six months in brackish water and mud. When the authorities finally hauled it to the surface and towed it to Port Townsend, Washington, in…
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Do Trees Talk to Each Other? I’m walking in the Eifel Mountains in western Germany, through cathedral-like groves of oak and beech, and there’s a strange unmoored feeling of entering a fairy tale. The trees have become vibrantly alive and charged with wonder. They’re communicating with one another, for starters. They’re involved in tremendous struggles…
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