Stories
The River That Changed Its Mind
In the spring of 2024, the Yellow River near Bayan Nur shifted its channel by 2.4 kilometers in eleven days. A county surveyor named Bao Wenli was the first to map it.
Senior contributor
Theo Branch
Theo Branch reports on rural labour, working lives, and the quiet science of ecosystems. He has filed for Common Hours from the Bitterroots, Kielder Forest, and the Bay of Fundy.
Beats
Published in Common Hours
Letters
The Unsent Letters of a Boston Printer
In a basement at the American Antiquarian Society, the unpublished correspondence of a forgotten Boston printer reveals what a working life looked like before the telephone.
Nature
Seven Days in the Kelp off Big Sur
A weeklong dive log records the underwater work of a marine biologist who has measured the giant kelp forests of the central California coast through three marine heatwaves, and is now watching them recover.
Places
The Twelve Blocks of Fitzgerald
On the northwest side of Detroit, a community land trust has taken title to one hundred and ninety properties across a twelve-block neighborhood. The residents own the houses. The trust owns the land.
Time
A Letter from Bennington: How a 1956 Note Closed a Vermont Property Case That Began in 1759
In April 1956, a retired schoolteacher in Bennington, Vermont, found a folded letter in a copy of Cowper's poems. It resolved a property dispute that had been open since the colonial period.
Profiles
The Keeper of the Clock
For thirty-one years, Friedrich Holst has climbed the tower in his small German town twice a week to maintain the public clock. He is the only person in town who knows how.
Crafts
The Bowyer of the Irati Forest
In a stone shed at the edge of a Navarrese beech forest, Iker Etxeberria splits yew staves with wedges and tillers hunting bows the way his grandfather did, by eye.
The Trades
The Jumper at McCall Waits for the Bell
A wildfire smokejumper based in central Idaho talks about the parachute, the pulaski, and the standby room where the crew waits for the radio to call.
Stories
The Night Pilot of the Bitterroots
At 68, Hollis Wren still flies search-and-rescue missions over Montana's Bitterroot Range after dark, when most pilots have gone home and most weather has turned.
Nature
The Slow Coming Back of the Tay Beavers
Two decades after the first unsanctioned releases, Eurasian beavers are reshaping the burns and side channels of Perthshire, and the ecologists who tracked them through the long unofficial years are finally being listened to.
Places
What Is Left at Loutro
On the south coast of Crete, in a village reachable only by boat or by foot, three commercial fishermen still work the dawn waters. Their sons will not.
Letters
The Library in Húsavík That Lends More Than Books
In a fishing town on Iceland's north coast, a small library lends seeds, fiddles, and bicycles. The librarian says she is only extending what a library always was.
Time
Letters Under Occupation: The Polish Underground Postal Service, 1942-1944
Between the autumn of 1942 and the rising of August 1944, a clandestine postal network moved tens of thousands of letters through occupied Warsaw. It had stamps, postmarks, and a chief postmaster who never lived to see liberation.
Crafts
The Bellfounder of San Piero
At a foundry near Pisa that has cast church bells since 1432, Lorenzo Capecchi still tunes bronze on a lathe his great-grandfather built, by ear and by harmonic.
Profiles
Forty-One Years at the Same Branch
Marisol Quintero has worked at the Eastlake Public Library since 1985. She knows the regulars by the books they read, and she remembers the ones who stopped coming.