A decade ago, Santa Fe author and antiques dealer Forrest Fenn, 89, hid a treasure chest containing $1 million in gold, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. A poem in Fenn’s memoir, titled “The Thrill of the Chase,” contained clues to the treasure’s location and he hoped hunting for it would inspire…
In 2019, the New York Philharmonic commissioned composer and force of nature Paola Prestini — co-founder of National Sawdust, that visionary locus of possibility for world-building through music — to compose an original piece for their multi-season Project 19 initiative, celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment. Inspired by the stories of the remarkable unsung…
On a recent Monday in a New Jersey cemetery, social worker Jane Blumenstein held a laptop with the screen facing a gravesite. A funeral was being held over Zoom, for a woman who died of COVID-19. It was a brilliantly sunny day, so a funeral worker held an umbrella over Blumenstein to shield the laptop…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is an epic poem from 1798 about a disastrous sea voyage. In the story, an albatross, a symbol of good luck, leads the ship out of icy waters. But when a sailor kills the bird, their luck turns and the rest of the crew punishes the…
The Battle of Fitjar, fought in southern Norway in 961, was a struggle between King Hákon ‘the Good’, once the foster-son of King Æthelstan of England, and his nephews, the sons of Erik ‘Bloodaxe’. The Viking Age was a turbulent period both within Scandinavia and in the extensive lands the Vikings travelled. According to a…