I suppose everyone who has ever lived into their 90s has found the world they still inhabit confusing and at times unknowable. An ancestral aunt of mine, Mary Barker, was born in Newbury, England, in ...

In Haitian Kreyòl, there’s a saying: Lè w pa gen manman, ou tete grann—“If you can’t get breast milk from mom, you get it from grandma.” Darline, a Haitian immigrant on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, ...

A version of this story first appeared in The Iowa Mercury. Ten years ago, the Sierra Club published cute illustrations with an article about how robots were picking lettuce in vertical farms. The ...

Editors Note: As we enter 2026, Barn Raiser marks the New Year by republishing “Finding Common Ground at a Montana Barn Raising,” an excerpt from Daniel Kemmis’s 1992 Community and the Politics of ...

While the media is full of details about how the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores was organized, one should focus on how strange this act is: Venezuela is now de facto occupied by ...

Last year, the Biden administration announced major climate goals: achieving a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 and a net zero emissions economy by no later than 2050. Twenty-nine states and ...

The following is the first installment of “Reimagining Rural Cartographies,” a new Barn Raiser series exploring innovative and nontraditional forms of mapping. It is guest-edited by Lydia Moran and ...

Old yellow school buses are a common sight in the summer parked along the flat, sandy farm fields in southern Delaware. They aren’t full of students, though. Stripped of their seats and windows, the ...

The following is the fourth installment of “Reimagining Rural Cartographies,” a new Barn Raiser series exploring innovative and nontraditional forms of mapping. It is guest-edited by Lydia Moran and ...

The election results reported in this story were updated on December 4, 2024, when the last House race, in California’s 13th Congressional District, was called. Donald Trump was elected the nation’s ...

Dustin Watson looks over the pastures and woodlands he grew up on. Behind him is the farmhouse his great-grandfather built, not far from the chicken coops and tractor sheds his grandfather raised ...

Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend ...