Carrying out a 1,500-year-old tradition, this woman prepares to dive for abalones, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and octopuses at Cheju Island off Korea’s southern tip. Cheju’s female divers, known as “haenyo”, begin honing their skills at the age of ten, learning to dive as deep as 60 feet and to hold their breath for up […] Read more

In 1998, two mountaineers climbing one of the highest,most forbidding peaks in the South American Andes, Mount Tupungato, made a startling discovery. On the rocky slopes of the 21,000-foot volcano, amidst scattered debris, lay an old Rolls Royce engine […] Read more

1933 was dark all over the world. Japan was already in Manchuria, and the League of Nations was dying in Geneva. In Germany, the Reichstag fire was history, so was the Weimar Republic. In Italy, Benito Mussolini had translated a people’s search for security into savage conquest. In rich, fertile America, fear and uncertainty lay […] Read more

Spring is finally here. Icy plains transform into lakes and lush boreal forests full of life. The bears are in their element. They have only a short summer to fatten up and the protein from the rotting meat is going a long way. But the ravens are a problem […] Read more

It is America’s music. It is an improvised Art, making itself up as it goes along. It rewards individual expression. But demands selfless collaboration. It is forever changing. But nearly always rooted in the blues. It has a rich tradition and its own rules. But it is brand new every night […] Read more

Gliding with uncanny grace, bottlenose dolphins pass the scalloped shadow of a mountain peak in Fiordland, New Zealand’s largest national park. Fiordland’s dolphins may spend their entire lives in a single fiord — denizens of an isolated world as dramatic above water as it is below. The jutting fist of Mitre Peak snags a passing […] Read more

This spectacular display of airtime by these dusky dolphins actually has a practical purpose. These are scouts looking for food. And this is only half the operation. Here’s the underwater scout patrol. Sending out dolphin sonar pings to locate a meal. The first dolphin airborne patrol does its best to stake out the banquet […] Read more

Drift nets can be deadly for many ocean creatures who become entangled in an invisible “wall” of netting. Along the U.S. East Coast, a swordfish drift-net fishery has historically entangled large numbers of marine mammals, including the highly endangered North Atlantic right whales and six species of dolphin. When the death rate of marine mammals […] Read more

James Joyce once said that he wanted to create a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day disappeared, it could be reconstructed entirely from his book Ulysses. He succeeded. The spirit of James Joyce is evident everywhere in bustling, booming modern Dublin, from the bronze statue of him leaning casually on […] Read more