Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2020 i National Geographic Magazine

FIRST, A BLACK DOT APPEARS IN THE DISTANCE. MORE DOTS JOIN, FORMING MEANDERING LINES ACROSS THE NEWLY WHITE ICESCAPE. “Then all of a sudden, you hear the first calls,” photographer Stefan Christmann says. That’s when it really hits him: “Wow. The birds are coming back.” It’s late March in Atka Bay, in Antarctica’s Queen Maud Land, nearly 2,700 miles southwest of the southern tip of Africa. Christmann has been waiting more than two months for the emperor penguins—the biggest of all penguins, standing about four feet tall and weighing up to nearly 90 pounds—to return from foraging at sea. His plan is to stay with the Atka Bay colony’s roughly 10,000 penguins through the winter, for the second time. He spent the winter here five years ago and has come…

ON A SUNNY MONDAY afternoon at Venice Beach, a tall young man in a T-shirt and baggy pants leaps over the rail of the skate park, drops his skateboard onto the concrete surface, mounts the wood with his left foot, and proceeds to glide along the park’s perimeter with increasing speed. He descends into one of the park’s two deep bowls, then soars back up and over its far lip. Approaching a platform, he and his skateboard leap onto it—but not before his back foot twirls the board 360 degrees, a move he executes again as he flies off the platform’s other end and lands on the pavement. His name is Sean Davis, and since the age of eight, he has thought of himself as a skateboarder above all else.…

WHO Markosian is a conceptual and documentary photographer based in London, England. WHERE The courtyard of a church on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba WHAT A Canon EOS 5D Mark IV camera with a 24mm f/1.4L II lens Markosian spent a month in Cuba to photograph transitions, and specifically the ritual of a young woman’s quinceañera. The Latin American tradition marking a girl’s 15th birthday as a passage to womanhood dates back to French debutante balls introduced to Mexico in the mid-19th century. Today many quinceañeras are special occasions with glitzy parties for entire communities, and some families complement the festivities with elaborate glamour-photo sessions. Friends are a large part of a quinceañera. Markosian captured this image of teenagers in a church courtyard outside Havana, as they waited with about…

GABRIELE GALIMBERTI placed two stands of photographic lights in front of a window outside a dwelling. He retreated so the people inside could safely retrieve the lights. Shouting through the window, Galimberti directed the positioning of lights and people, then made his photos. This is quarantine portraiture. “It’s the strangest moment I’ve lived in 42 years of life,” says Galimberti, an Italian photographer who was in Milan in late February when the lockdown went into effect. He and journalist Gea Scancarello spent the following weeks documenting how coronavirus changed life in the city. In hopes of making portraits of some of Milan’s inhabitants, they began calling their friends. “I immediately felt a sort of fear in their voices,” Galimberti recalls. “Fear about the idea of going out and, a couple of…

A Modest Proposal (1729) is Jonathan Swift’s mock solution to Irish poverty. Voltaire’s Candide (1759) ridicules blind optimism in the face of inhumanity and disaster. Animal Farm (1945) is George Orwell’s veiled critique of Stalinism. Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark comedy about nuclear brinkmanship (left).…

A FISHERMAN I KNOW named Joar Hesten called me late in April 2019. A beluga whale was swimming around his boat near the northern tip of Norway. It appeared to be wrapped in a tight harness, and Hesten didn’t know what to do. Belugas are usually found in pods in areas with ice and glaciers—rarely alone along the Norwegian coast. As a marine biologist, I knew that the harness needed to be removed as soon as possible. I had no idea how puzzling it would turn out to be. We contacted the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries Sea Surveillance Service. When inspector Jørgen Ree Wiig and his crew rendezvoused with the fishing boat, the nearly 12-foot-long male eagerly engaged with them. He’d clearly been trained. The mystery deepened when Hesten got…

BREAKING THE AXIS January 1942: Europe is in Hitler’s grasp, but the Allies are striking back. They’re pushing Axis forces out of North Africa while Soviet armies are fighting fierce battles of attrition in the east. The largest amphibious invasion in history, on the shores of Normandy in 1944, opens a new western front. DEFEATING JAPAN August 1942: Japanese forces dominate land and sea, from eastern China to the Solomon Islands. But Allied forces led by the U.S. are about to mount a twopronged strategy to dislodge them. Naval, land, and air forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. William Halsey concentrate on the eastern and South Pacific, while Adm. Chester Nimitz retakes islands in the central Pacific. The British fight back the Japanese in Burma. PEAKS OF BRUTALITY This…

New Zealand Bronwyn Clifford, 16, stands with other Maori women on Waitangi Day, observed each February to commemorate the Treaty of Waitangi, signed by some 500 Maori chiefs and the British in 1840. Much ancestral land was lost during Britain’s 19th-century colonization. Today Maori women use social media to mobilize support for indigenous land rights and other reforms. Afghanistan Latifa Muhsini, 35, is the deputy governor of Bamyan Province. Women now hold the position in five of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Here, Muhsini, who pledges to protect her province’s environment, enjoys her weekly hike in Band-e-Amir, Afghanistan’s first national park, with her husband (by her side) and their friend. Bolivia Shortly after she was elected in 2015 as the first woman mayor of El Alto, Soledad Chapetón Tancara, center, received threats,…

Magnetic heart passes test At least 26 million people worldwide suffer heart failure; only about 5,500 a year get transplants. Artificial hearts so far have been heavy and complex—but a new “maglev heart” (right), powered by a single, magnetically levitating disk, could be a solution. Tested successfully in cows, the palm-size titanium device will soon begin human trials. —CD ARTIFACTS Honoring how Inca kept records Because the Inca Empire lacked alphabetic writing, bureaucrats made notes with a quipu, a tool of colored strings and knots. Researchers studying 1,000 or so surviving quipus say they likely were used to record census data, taxes, and stories about Inca rulers. In January the Peruvian Ministry of Culture gave the quipu national heritage status, hailing it as an ingenious legacy of the indigenous culture.…

WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO KNOW, AND HOW TO SEE THE WORLD GETTING THERE ‘DOTTED WITH THE RUINS OF EMPIRES ONCE GREAT, [JORDAN] IS THE LAST RESORT OF YESTERDAY IN THE WORLD OF TOMORROW.’—Hussein bin Talal, former king of Jordan WHAT YOU’LL SEE Opened in 2017 and conceived as a north-to-south route, the trail begins in the village of Umm Qais and ends at the Red Sea city of Al Aqabah. Despite Jordan’s arid climate, the landscape varies from olive tree–studded slopes in the north to water-lapped shores in the south. In between lie the otherworldly sandstone formations of Wadi Rum—often a movie stand-in for Mars—where pictographs from the Nabataean culture date back more than two millennia. EXPLORE MORE On the trail: Earth’s lowest land point, the Dead Sea has…

IN DENMARK you’re never more than 30 miles from the sea. Aside from Jutland’s boundary with Germany, Denmark is entirely surrounded by water, with a total of 5,437 miles of coastline, or kystland. “This made it perfect for the Viking society, in which sailing was the most important way to get around,” says Rikke Johansen, curator at the Viking Ship Museum, in Roskilde. “Land divided people; water connected them.” Fishing was a necessity for survival long before Denmark, which is made up of 406 islands, became an agricultural nation, but today, Johansen says, water means leisure for most Danes: “We take it for granted; it’s a way of life. For many of us, looking out at water every day is key.” The whole of Denmark is lowland, formed by Ice…

NINE DAYS AFTER THE ATOMIC BOMB was dropped on Hiroshima, after his parents and year-old brother died and his home was incinerated, seven-year-old Masaaki Tanabe watched his father slip away. His last words: “I see no future as an army officer.” An implacable enemy of America, Tanabe’s father died with his sword at his side. Tanabe’s grandfather wanted to keep his son’s sword, but the occupation forces came and wrested it from him. “Barbarians,” young Tanabe thought. He was determined to take revenge against America, he says. ¶ Understandable. He had nothing and almost no one left. His home had been next to Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the now iconic building with the skeletal dome, preserved as an appeal for nuclear forbearance. Now in his early 80s, Tanabe is a…

It was November 6, 2019, and the municipal building was on fire, set ablaze after a disputed October presidential election and protests that ousted socialist president Evo Morales. Mayor María Patricia Arce Guzmán, 48, a member of Morales’s party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), escaped the smoke and tried to dodge the hostile crowd outside. Hobbled by a bad knee, she ran through the streets of Vinto, a town in the central Bolivian department of Cochabamba where she’d been mayor since June 2015. She lost her shoes but didn’t stop. “Then they grabbed me and started shouting that I was a murderer,” Arce later told me. And her hours-long ordeal began. Rioters doused her in gasoline. She also smelled of urine and bleach. Kicked, beaten with sticks, and pelted with…