Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2021 i National Geographic Magazine

ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY IN THE SUMMERS OF MY CHILDHOOD, I spent time in upstate New York at my grandparents’ lakeside home, far from the polluting light of big cities. At night, I would pull a blanket from my bed and drag it down the pine needle–covered path from the house to the boat dock. Stretched out there, I would gaze at the star-filled sky for as long as the grown-ups allowed. I didn’t have words for what I was feeling: the pull of the cosmos, beautiful and awe-inspiring. Fast-forward more than a decade to summer 2002, when I first learned of astronomy in the extreme, energetic and exciting. I was a summer intern at the University of Chicago, an institution known for its physics pioneers. Among…

“WE ARE NOT BEING acknowledged on our own lands, our own continents, our own territories and in the history books … but here we are, the invisible peoples,” says Gene Tagaban, 56, of Ruston, Washington. Tagaban, whose Tlingit name is Guuy Yaau, is Cherokee, Tlingit, and Filipino. He strives to keep his people’s ancestral wisdom and history alive through storytelling, mentoring, healing, and learning.…

HANA PEOPLES of Seattle said the constant guessing game about her identity makes her feel like a specimen. Her six-word story, “I am not an exotic creature,” was born of exasperation. Peoples, 27, said she’s been subjected to harassment and unwanted attention from “creepy men” who fetishize a woman who is Asian and Black. “Every time I would just walk outside in the world, I was kind of hyperaware of how people were looking at me,” said Peoples, who recently earned a master’s degree in cinema and media studies from UCLA. “Because I have an ‘ambiguous look,’ I get many guesses from people about what I am,” she wrote. “I have gotten Mexican, Filipino, Nepali, Chinese, but rarely can people guess that I am both African American and Japanese.”…

MARISHA VANDENBERG says she had never been happier in her life. After raising three children with her husband, Richard, she had returned to school with the intent of earning a master’s degree in education. Yet when one of her professors at California Baptist University in Riverside asked students to send their six-word stories to the Race Card Project back in 2017, Marisha wrote about regret. “Blackcican Spanish Speaker Didn’t Teach Kids” are the six words she chose for her class assignment. Her first three words are like a quick bio: Her father is Black and Creole, and her mother’s side of the family came from Mexico. Marisha was raised in a tight-knit family that included her Latino grandparents, two uncles, and three aunts. Her next three words, “didn’t teach kids,”…

The detailed models a father and son made in the 19th century as research tools are now in museums.…

Amid the black-tuxedoed throngs of king penguins on South Georgia island, this one’s yellow and beige plumage may look freakish. But animals with missing pigmentation, a condition called leucism, aren’t vanishingly rare: It occurs in one out of every 20,000 gentoo penguins, for example. Though the coloration makes for a stunning photo, standing out could hinder the bird’s ability to find a mate and heighten its risk of being gobbled up by an orca or a leopard seal.…

THE MOST INTERESTING, most revealing, most honest, and gravest conversations about race are the ones we typically never get to hear, because they percolate in private spaces. In the locker room or the bedroom. At the kitchen table or during a smoke break outside the factory. The conversations people have with themselves in their own head while brushing their teeth or driving to work. The rise of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Parler have created new windows to peer at our consternation about race. But even with that relatively new gust of candor, there is still roiling terrain that our computer and phone screens cannot reliably reach. There are still self-imposed filters that often keep people from posting their innermost questions or laments in an open forum…

PEOPLE IN HIS AFFLUENT neighborhood on the coast of central California were friendly enough when he was accompanied by his wife, who is white and German, and their mixed-race children, says Quarles, 58. But the reception was always much less friendly when he was alone. An ultrasound technician with long dreadlocks, Quarles became something of a minor celebrity after his story was featured on National Public Radio, and now people in his community know who he is. That’s a good thing, he says, because his kids are now in college and can no longer help make others feel safe around him.…

ON THE FIRST NIGHT Esayas Mehretab moved into a new apartment with his college roommate back in 2012, they decided to go out with a group of five friends. They all piled into a minivan and headed out to explore the neighborhood around Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Within seconds they were pulled over by city police and told to exit the car one by one, with their hands up. “It just got crazy because we got pulled over and there was one cop car and we’re like, ‘What’s going on?’” Mehretab says. “And then there were two cop cars, then three, then four, then five, then six, and they just kept coming. We were pretty scared to say the least.” Mehretab says police handcuffed the students, told them to…

CELESTE GREEN doesn’t mind that people see her as a strong Black woman. She is in fact all three of those things. What irks the 32-year-old resident physician is that it’s too often all that people see, overlooking traits that make her equally proud: her grace, intelligence, patience, and composure. So when it was time to write an application essay for her second attempt to get into medical school, she built her personal statement around the six-word story she sent to the Race Card Project back in 2012: “We aren’t all ‘Strong Black Women.’” “Who I am is not just a Strong Black Woman, frowning and forging through life like a checklist,” Green wrote in her essay to the University of North Carolina’s medical school in Chapel Hill. “It is…

I. On June 27, 2015, Black artist and activist Bree Newsome Bass climbed the flagpole at the South Carolina statehouse and took down the Confederate flag that had flown above the people of that state for over 50 years. This act came 10 days after a white supremacist murdered eight Black parishioners and their pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Grown from a congregation first organized by enslaved and free Blacks in the late 18th century, Emanuel is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the American South. It is a church where Black freedom has been envisioned and practiced throughout the entirety of its existence, from the 19th-century congregant Denmark Vesey—who bought his own freedom and helped plan a revolt of his fellow human beings who…

ENGLISH BIOLOGICAL anthropologist Alice Roberts had so often ridiculed the human form’s shortcomings that in 2018 a colleague gave her this challenge: Redesign the body by improving upon its parts. Finding inspiration in nonhuman species, Roberts speculated that we might be better off with some of their features, including the marsupial’s pouch. No human mother will be pocketing her little Joey like a joey anytime soon, but many animals—and not just marsupials—have vital uses for their built-in storage containers. Here are five. 1. SEAHORSE He does the hard labor In seahorse couples, the female deposits her eggs into the male, which holds them in a frontal compartment called a brood pouch. After 14 to 28 days, he delivers up to 1,500 fry in a water birth. 2. SEA OTTER Storage…

LINDSEY LOVEL HEIDRICH works in criminal justice reform for a large philanthropy in New York, but her roots are in the South. She was born in Arkansas and later moved to San Diego and Atlanta. She says her ancestors ran a small plantation in Georgia and owned slaves. “When I try and bring things up, or I try and criticize the South, you know, it’s never gone over great with my family,” said Lovel Heidrich, 33. “These are people who raised me and made me the person that I am, yet there’s this tremendous disconnect between understanding our past. It’s almost as if we see them through these totally different lenses, and I’m really struggling to sort of see how we can come together on that. Probably more so now…

SOMETIMES SUBMISSIONS to the Race Card Project hit people like a punch to the gut, and Daniel Robbins’s six words certainly fall into that category. They tend to make people squirm. Some are angry that he would dare to say something like this out loud. They are offended by his honesty. I have a different take. I appreciate his candor, because it represents an attitude that is very much alive in the workplace and the classroom and really anyplace where the achievements of people from historically marginalized groups collide with deeply ingrained expectations. Robbins, a product designer who lives in Seattle, submitted his six words back in 2014 after attending a leadership program that explored the roots and impact of racism. “No matter how liberal and progressive I might claim…

KRISTEN MOORHEAD sent her six words to the project on November 26, 2014, the day Cleveland police had released a grainy surveillance video showing how 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot by an officer seconds after the officer arrived in response to a 911 call. The child, it turned out, was holding a toy pistol. Like Tamir Rice, Moorhead’s son, Che, was 12 then. His mother typed, “I wish he was a girl.” She said it felt like a silent scream. “I’ve always told my son, ‘You can be anything you want to be,’” she also wrote that day. “He’s 12 now. Almost my height and swears he doesn’t see color. His possibilities are infinite, yes, but there’s a cruel catch. You can be anything you want to be, but first…