Lauren Markham

1 month ago | lithub.com | Lauren Markham |Chris Arnold

Lauren Markham and Chris Feliciano Arnold on the Urgency Writing Truth to Power Back in 2017, White House Press Secretary Kellyann Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” to describe realities that were inconvenient to the first Trump Administration. Eight years later, as the second Trump Administration reconfigures the federal government around the facts, opinions and impulses of its choosing, the US public is becoming desensitized to life in a country where reliable information is...

1 month ago | earthisland.org | Lauren Markham

Remembrance in the Anthropocene Memories of the vanishing world can be an alchemical force to transform feelings into action. LAST MONTH, I was in Greece researching the impacts of climate change on the olive harvests.

2 months ago | inthesetimes.com | Lauren Markham

It was June in northern Norway, a time of year when there’s little night to speak of anyway, and Tommy Olsen had spent most of it fielding distress calls from migrant boats crossing the Aegean Sea into Greece. Like most mornings, the schoolteacher and father of five awoke to dozens of WhatsApp messages. This, too, was usual enough.

2 months ago | harpers.org | Lauren Markham

Listen to an audio version of this article. The saga began in mid-July 2022, when Giorgos Christides, a Greek reporter for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, began messaging someone who claimed to be one of about forty migrants stranded on a small islet somewhere in the middle of the Evros River, which forms a border between Greece and Turkey. The group was composed of men, women, and children, most of them from Syria.

2 months ago | hcn.org | Lauren Markham

The California artist Heidi Quante has spent her adulthood as an activist and community organizer, largely within the climate movement. The work, like much work that confronts systemic offenses, took its toll. When things felt bleak and smothering, she’d often jump into the Pacific Ocean. It would buoy her. But a few years back, she told me, when she plunged into the sea, she felt nothing. “My depression didn’t lift,” she said. “I knew I was fucked.” A friend invited her up to the mountains.