Patrick Pittman

A quiet story from the edge of Lake Superior about grief, renewal, and the art of listening.

The Slaughterhouse-Five author believed there were just eight different story 'shapes'—and that they might be of interest to anthropologists. The anthropologists thought otherwise. But why?

“Because twentieth-century history spread its cataclysms liberally around the globe, most people alive can consider themselves survivors to some extent,” writes the Russian poet and essayist Maria Stepanova in In Memory of Memory, originally published in 2017 and presented by New Directions in a caring and delicate translation by the poet Sasha Dugdale. Survivors, all of us included, Stepanova thinks, tend toward a habit to define our present by the traumas of the story that’s arrived with us, passed down and obscured through retelling and haphazardly preserved documentary evidence. These survivors, she writes, are bound to a lifelong quest for “something to remember and to call back to life at the expense of their own today.”

Dreaming of an impossible garden in Tajikistan’s mountainous hinterland.

I drove to the top of Michigan to report on the otherworldly story of David Milarch and the Archangel Tree Project.

A regular feature I did for Smith Journal, speaking at length with some incredible people—the likes of Errol Morris, Chris Hadfield, Chuck Klosterman, Ira Glass—and asking them what they’d come to learn about life. This one is with Benjamin Ferencz, then the last surviving prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

To accompany the late great Anthony Bourdain's trip to Newfoundland for Parts Unknown, I reported out the state of the cod fisheries with help from the scientists, the unions, and the fishers themselves.

Reporting from Iceland on the coming political realities for the Arctic as the sea ice retreats.

Uncovering the stories of missile strikes and dark prison sites from the buildings and rubble left behind, with Eyal Weizman and his research agency Forensic Architecture.

I visited with Barry Lopez, one of the great environmental writers of our time, in the wilds of Oregon to reflect on ethics, hope, mortality, and the importance of good people in times that are not.

A profile of pioneering soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause.

I travelled to Vanuatu to interview their then-PM (subsequently in prison, I believe) and various village chiefs and community leaders about the struggles they face to build a sustainable economy as the tides rise around them.

Reconsidering the legacy of a much maligned moment in contemporary art within a sixty-year trajectory of digital and new media art making.

The idea of the botanic garden in the West is deeply rooted in the history of European imperialism and extractivism. Led by London's iconic Kew, botanic gardens around the world are now attempting to untangle the legacies of empire.

The chaos and order of the garden has been a running theme through much of Olivia Laing's work, and her particular way of looking at the world. No matter how Edenic a garden, the outside world is always creeping in.

A review of Marcel Dzama’s show first Canadian exhibition in more than a decade, an ecstatic awakening of the wild things that stalk the country's inside-out landscape.

The fourth Bonavista Biennale in Newfoundland was an exploration of meeting points, of the communal but sometimes parasitic energy that sparks when one place becomes home to another.

On Jacqueline Rose’s The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, a collection of essays which navigates our present chaos with help from those who thought their way through the calamities of the last century.

A slow journey up and down the Wakhan valley on the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, as the inaugural recipient of the Studio D Radiodurans travel writing grant.

On the wildly utopian handbuilt structures of the late great “natural architect” SunRay Kelley, a couple of years before his death.

A cover interview with MVRDV's Winy Maas, in which he speaks a little frankly on his firm's gorgeous but slightly controversial library without books in Tianjin.

For this cover story, which was huge amounts of fun to report, I went behind the scenes of Australia’s morning media, checking out breakfast radio control rooms, the floors of troubled newsrooms and the harshly lit studios of tabloid TV shows.

The sun is shining over Berlin Mitte. Amidst the bombed out ballhauses, gentrified cafes and tourist traps, we wander down a laneway to the back of an old building, the railings on the windows depicting what appear to be children playing. Max explains that the building, before the war, was a music school for Jewish children. The burdens of history are never far from view in Mitte. We retreat up some winding stairs to a stark white room, full of analogue equipment and a grand piano.

There are forces of nature, and then there is Vandana Shiva. Hers is a name close to the lips of anybody engaged in questions of sustainable agriculture, of social justice, of globalisation, of any of the great sociocultural fights of the past couple of decades.

To hear his music is to stumble upon the secret sounds of an ancient forest. It is sparse, built on bowed strings, guitar and the occasional hint of a piano. If you listen closely, you’ll hear the sound of birds, of leaves drawn against wire, of the mud of the English moors underfoot. It is music to turn up, in an empty house, and be transported in your bodily entirety to worlds long lost, but perhaps to come again.

An organic dairy farmer from down under finds a way to make a living in the midst of an ugly milk price war.