(Click on the title to view the whole piece)
 

Airports
 
Those acronymic names still manage to summon up a ghost of awe: BOS, LAX and CDG, JFK and LHR. These are the grandest kings and queens of airports, the gods that no one believes in anymore but is forced to worship anyway.
 
Matthew Wollin

 

Brujería
 
Mary's a healer. She's learning how to work her hands. She lays them on; she strokes; she massages; her aura cures by relieving congested paths in the patient's limbs—joints, trunk, neck, head. She drags their feeble electric juices along; she gets them flowing again: your tennis elbow, your yanked sacroiliac or compressed vertebra; your blocked ureter or locked pylorus.
 
Jascha Kessler

 

On Being Cold
 
When you live in a place of such drastic weather, every second of beauty is a reminder. It's a reminder of the nature of Earth, and it's a reminder of the nature of humanity. So evanescent, so distracted, but capable of so much as well. Can you feel the ice of it?
 
Natasha Watts

 

Career Antics: Anthropologists, Aging, and A Crack at the Celebrity Circuit
 
Opportunities and satisfactions late in one's life were ever dwindling. The question became: Where were independence, regard, and security to be found in these elderly American lives?
 
Julia Braun Kessler

 

On the Twelfth Anniversary of the Crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261
 
I didn't ask for these names to be placed together. I had expected the young, the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, to be interspersed with the older passengers, and for the list to continue unbounded. That more names aren't listed here causes a shudder of guilt: what I'm looking at may not always last, but what is on the screen will.
 
David Ewald