Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2021 i National Geographic Magazine

Fifty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, another march for civil rights and social justice drew thousands of people to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Organizers dubbed it the Commitment March: Get Your Knee Off Our Necks, a reference to George Floyd’s May 25 killing. To capture this scene, Stephen Wilkes photographed from a single fixed camera position on an elevated crane, making images at intervals throughout a 16-hour period. He then edited the best moments and blended them seamlessly into one image.…

National Geographic photographer since 2017 OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS I’ve been working on “Living Lullabies,” my project on how caregivers create safer spaces for their children through nighttime song and story. My reporting partner, Rupert Compston, and I went to the Turkish-Syrian border; for refugee and migrant families there, lullabies were a piece of home that they could take with them, almost as portable sanctuaries. We went to Liberia, where we spoke with young mothers who’d had their babies as teenagers, and saw how they were singing hope in their lullabies. Then we visited Mongolia, one of the coldest places in the world. To heat their homes, nomadic families would burn coal, which of course pollutes the air. We met a mother who sang lullabies with healing words when…

When Yasser Arafat, the longtime leader of the Palestinians, died in France on November 11, 2004, his death was mysterious and his followers’ grief was overpowering. The Associated Press sent maybe a dozen photographers to cover his burial on the West Bank the next day. “I was one of the roving guys,” says David Guttenfelder. Most of the other photographers had staked out positions on the rooftops surrounding Arafat’s walled compound, which was being swarmed by tens of thousands of people. When the helicopter carrying Arafat’s coffin appeared over the horizon, “the mourners started pouring over the walls,” says Guttenfelder. “And I just did the same. “I jumped over the wall, and my feet were lifted off the ground,” he says. “I was just swept through.” He used his shoulders…

‘Memory is a wonderful thing until you have to confront it,” says Diana Markosian. She recalled her childhood as fragments of memories spent in Russia, Armenia, and the United States. Only later did she understand the sacrifice behind them. Markosian was seven the night that her mother, Svetlana, awakened her and her brother in their Moscow home and told them, “We’re going on a trip.” Some 20 years later, Markosian learned that Svetlana had left Russia without telling Diana’s father, from whom she was separated; and that to start a new life with her children, Svetlana found a man through classified ads and moved the family to the United States. Markosian’s mother showed her dozens of letters from men who had written to her in Moscow. She had picked the…

Kristan Small holds a folded flag in honor of her father, Korean War veteran Gordon Small, who died on May 8 after contracting COVID-19. She joined others gathered at the Michigan State Capitol to call for a complete counting of all presidential election ballots. Citing President Donald Trump’s push to stop the counting of some mail-in ballots, she said, “I’m here because we have a president who has claimed to have absolute authority but hasn’t read the Constitution.” “WE KNOW THAT DEMOCRACY IS FRAGILE. IT MUST BE TENDED. MY FATHER VOTED IN EVERY ELECTION. THEY’D DAMN WELL BETTER COUNT MY VOTE.”— KRISTAN SMALL…

A city employee disinfects a street in Beyoǧlu, a tourist district empty of tourists. When communities shut down across the world, many people could retreat to their homes. Others, newly deemed essential, had to keep working. Like many countries, Turkey sent out armies of workers in protective gear to spray the streets, hoping to contain the virus and, perhaps, reassure its citizens that action was being taken. The World Health Organization later warned that this method was ineffective at halting the spread of the coronavirus and that the disinfectants could potentially harm people’s health. “THE CITY MARKS ALL THOSE WHO PASS THROUGH IT, WHO VISIT IT, WHO LIVE THERE. ISTANBUL CASTS A SPELL. SINCE COVID-19, ALL THIS HAS ALMOST DISAPPEARED.”—EMIN ÖZMEN…

In August an explosion of stored ammonium nitrate in Beirut’s port tore across historic neighborhoods, leveled buildings, killed some 200 people, and injured 6,500. Ariana Sursock, 18, was in her family’s home, the 1870 Sursock Palace, with her 98-year-old grandmother, who later died from injuries caused by flying glass and debris. The explosion, linked to a lack of government oversight of safety protocols, led to protests and calls for political change. “I’m not going to start the restoration before we know where we are going [as a country],” said Roderick Sursock, Ariana’s father. “I THOUGHT, THIS IS THE END—THERE’S NO WAY I’M GOING TO SURVIVE THIS.”—ARIANA SURSOCK, RECALLING THE EXPLOSION THAT RIPPED THROUGH HER HOME IN BEIRUT…

In a year of plagues, East Africa got an extra one: desert locusts. The swarms, which began moving into the region in late 2019, became a terrifying threat to Africa’s farmers. In January, Kenya had its worst locust outbreak in 70 years. The insects flourish when arid areas get heavy rain and blooms of vegetation, triggering a population boom. Winds from the Arabian Peninsula push the swarms into the Horn of Africa, leading to hunger for millions of people. A single swarm can swell to 70 billion locusts and destroy more than 300 million pounds of crops a day. Even a smaller swarm of 40 million can eat as much in a day as 35,000 people. “WE FEAR FOR OUR FUTURE, BECAUSE THESE KINDS OF SWARMS WILL MEAN WE DON’T…

Auto factory workers eat a socially distanced lunch under new restrictions to halt the spread of COVID-19. The virus likely first emerged in November 2019 in Wuhan, a hub of steel and auto manufacturing. A strict curfew was put in place in January 2020. More than two months later, after a drop in daily infections, residents were allowed to slowly restart their lives, though not without careful precautions: Workers, like these employees of Dongfeng Honda, were required to wear masks, undergo temperature checks, and maintain safe distances. “We still need to remind ourselves that as Wuhan is unblocked, we can be pleased, but we must not relax,” People’s Daily, a staterun paper, warned.…

The figures in Antonio Canova’s 19th-century The Three Graces cling to each other in an empty rotunda of Milan’s Gallerie d’Italia last spring, when Italy’s museums were closed to the public. European museums are reopening slowly, with social distancing rules, temperature checks of visitors, and restrictions on attendees. For small, privately owned attractions, ticket revenue loss poses an existential threat. Up to a tenth of the world’s museums now say they may be forced to permanently close, according to the International Council of Museums. “THE PANDEMIC IS FAR FROM OVER. MUSEUMS ARE LOSING A LOT OF MONEY, AND THEY WILL KEEP DOING SO EVEN AFTER THEIR REOPENING.”—JULIA PAGEL, NETWORK OF EUROPEAN MUSEUM ORGANISATIONS…

Musician Daniel Owino Okoth, known as Futwax, sings his song “Have You Sanitized?” with his four-year-old son and apprentice keyboardist, Julian Austin. From his home in Nairobi’s Kibera neighborhood, Futwax wrote and recorded the song to encourage safe health practices during the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m a community leader and icon here, and people listen to my music across Kenya,” he said. “So it’s my duty to make sure that everyone knows what’s happening and are doing what they can to try and stay safe. We have to be our own solution.” Futwax, who walked through town with a megaphone promoting safety, noted that social distancing is not an option for Kibera’s residents. “We share toilets. We share entrances and exits of houses. We share where we iron our clothes after…

Barbara Liz Cepeda, 44, of Kissimmee, Florida, leads bomba dancers at an early polling place, entertaining voters as they wait in line. Born in Puerto Rico, Cepeda has lived in Florida for 17 years. The eighth-generation bomba dancer started a dance school to honor her mother, Tata Cepeda, and continue a family legacy. Bomba is an Afro-Puerto Rican dance form developed in that U.S. territory by enslaved people who were brought there from West Africa.…

Not all viruses lead to global pandemics. Some have evolved to our benefit. An ancient virus called HERV-K may protect human embryos from other viruses, according to Joanna Wysocka, a professor of both chemical and systems biology and of developmental biology at Stanford University. When an embryo reaches the eight-cell stage (as projected at left), HERV-K is activated and may nudge the cells to build proteins that shield them from infection. It turns off when the embryo implants in the uterus. Ancient viruses make up nearly 8 percent of human DNA, with HERV-K joining an ancestor’s genome more than 30 million years ago. Scientists like Wysocka are continuing to untangle how viruses have become a part of us.…

Every year more than a million wildebeests rumble north across the Serengeti in a migration that is one of the world’s great spectacles. In 2020 it was no different. Herds followed seasonal rain from northern Tanzania to Kenya’s Masai Mara. During one summer sunset several thousand wildebeests gathered at the edge of the Mara River and spilled down its banks. Crocodiles awaited them in the water and hyenas on the other side of the river. Fresh green grass did too, and so they pushed forward, as they always do.…

One of the most helpful therapies for COVID-19 is one of the simplest: turning patients, such as this intensive care patient in Moscow, onto their stomachs, which improves the lungs’ ability to get oxygen into the blood. Nearly a year into the pandemic, doctors are getting a handle on which medications and techniques best treat the disease. They’ve learned that the antiviral remdesivir shortens recovery time, while the steroid dexamethasone cuts the risk of death by a third in patients requiring ventilation. “THIS IS NOT A MAGIC CURE, BUT … IT’S ACTUALLY BEEN FAIRLY REMARKABLE HOW MANY PEOPLE RESPOND TO PRONE POSITIONING, AND OFTEN PRETTY RAPIDLY.”—KEVIN MCGURK, A CHIEF EMERGENCY RESIDENT AT COOK COUNTY HEALTH IN CHICAGO…

Photographer Ian Teh spends much of his working life on the road. The pandemic allowed him to stay home with his wife, Chloe Lim, in Kuala Lumpur. “My partner and I are lucky that both our families are safe,” he says. “The pandemic has been an opportunity for us to connect with our loved ones, virtually.” One day he took a self-portrait: “We are sitting by our favorite spot in our apartment, looking out to the nearby houses and greenery. It’s peaceful.” “FAMILY IS FAMILY—IT’S WHERE HOME IS. MINE IS AT HOME WITH MY PARTNER. THE REST OF MY FAMILY ARE SPREAD ACROSS THE GLOBE LIKE FAIRY DUST.”—IAN TEH…

Hannah Reyes Morales feels strongly about how media depict “women who are survivors.” In part that’s because she is a survivor of childhood sexual assault. And she’s committed to using photography to document the realities of women survivors’ lives, which, she says, often are “much more complex than they’re made out to be.” In the project “Shelter from the Storm,” Morales partnered with writer Aurora Almendral to tell the stories of Filipinas who left rural provinces to become sex workers in Angeles City, a Philippine red-light district. Many of the women support families in villages that, as climate change worsens, may increasingly be devastated by typhoons. Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest tropical cyclones on record, hit the Philippines in 2013. It displaced some four million people, creating what one…

National Geographic photographer since 2011 I SPENT EARLY 2020 in a UC Riverside lab filming hummingbirds, trying to come up with new techniques for capturing their movements and behavior. The pandemic ended that; in mid-March we had to leave the university, and the whole state locked down. Normally I live with four other housemates; that grew to eight. It was sort of an impromptu commune and a wonderful time. We all really bonded, and I got to reconnect with folks I hadn’t spent much time with when I was on the road eight or nine months a year. I have a fellowship from National Geographic and the Rita Allen Foundation to study jellyfish. Initially it was to be a global project: flying to Japan, visiting aquariums, filming and photographing in…

Francisco James, resident funeral director at Leo F. Kearns Funeral Home, checks some of the bodies held in a refrigerated container. In an eight-week surge of COVID-19 deaths in New York last spring, the funeral home served 350 families; typically it handles about 75 deaths during a two-month period. “NOBODY REALLY THINKS OF US ON THE FRONT LINES. YOU HEAR ABOUT FIREFIGHTERS, DOCTORS, BUT YOU NEVER SEE ‘THANK YOU, FUNERAL DIRECTORS.’ WE’RE THE LAST OF THE FIRST RESPONDERS.”— FRANCISCO JAMES…

A memorial in Michigan was one of many nationwide honoring Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died at 87 on September 18. Ginsburg was a feminist trailblazer long before she was nominated to the high court in 1993 by then President Bill Clinton. She successfully worked on behalf of gender equality in a distinguished legal career. Her death led to a contentious pre-election scramble in the U.S. Senate over filling Ginsburg’s seat. Conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed on October 26 as Ginsburg’s replacement.…

Governments have struggled to halt the spread of coronavirus in their communities. In Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego, one of the hardest hit regions in Argentina, the local government tried installing thermal scanners at the entrances of the two biggest supermarkets. As the only shops open during lockdown, the stores drew people from across town; officials thought the cameras would help identify those with a fever. A doctor and a city official monitored each device and sent home customers with elevated temperatures. But the scanners weren’t effective at identifying the sick: They only measure skin temperature, which fluctuates with the external environment. “EVEN WITH THE BEST INTENTIONS, THE THERMAL CAMERAS HAD A TOUGH TIME IDENTIFYING ACCURATE BODY TEMPERATURES.”—LUJÁN AGUSTI…

Relatives and friends gather for the double funeral of 104-year-old Alexteen Alvira Roberts and her son, Brandis Metcalf Roberts, 79. Brandis died from COVID-19 complications in a nursing home. Alexteen, who came to the U.K. from Jamaica in 1955, died of natural causes. In England and Wales, Black people have been roughly four times as likely as whites to die from the virus, according to the Office for National Statistics. The high death rate reflects centuries of inequalities that minority groups have faced. “DOCUMENTING A CRISIS FIRST-HAND—WITNESSING SUCCESS AND SHORTCOMINGS—IS ESSENTIAL TO INFORM POLICY AND HOLD LEADERS ACCOUNTABLE.”—LYNSEY ADDARIO, ON PHOTOGRAPHING THE U.K.’S OUTBREAK…

California’s North Complex fire scorched more than 200,000 acres in just 24 hours this past September. The conflagration started as two separate fires in August during a powerful lightning storm that swept across Northern and central California. Weeks later, the fires, stoked by vicious winds, merged and exploded in size. The North Complex fire quickly destroyed much of the town of Berry Creek and killed 15 people—a grim reminder of the catastrophe that struck Paradise, California, just 40 miles to the northwest, in 2018. Cal Fire, a statewide firefighting and emergency services agency, says that fires in California and the West have grown larger, hotter, faster, and more dangerous, particularly in the past several years. There are a few reasons for this: A century of overzealous fire suppression ignored the…

Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364, has survived religious upheaval, annexations, and world wars, in addition to the deportation of 155 academics to a German concentration camp in 1939. On March 10 the school suspended lectures and closed many campus operations, emptying one of the world’s oldest and most resilient learning institutions. The main reading hall, shown here, turned desolate. Schools around the globe made similar accommodations. From preschools to law schools, educational leaders are grappling with how to reopen safely. For those at Jagiellonian, the 2020-21 school year is a blend of online and in-person learning. “I’M AFRAID TO GET TOO USED TO IT. IF THE WORLD SPEEDS UP EVER AGAIN, THE SOUND SHIFT MAY BE HARSH.”—PHOTOGRAPHER RAFA? MILACH ON THE NEWFOUND QUIET…

With many flights canceled, the train from the city center to Charles de Gaulle Airport is nearly empty. When stay-at-home orders were issued in mid-March, Paris became one of the first iconic cities to shut down in the face of the coronavirus. William Daniels observed that he had never seen his city so quiet. “One day when I was shooting at the main entrance of Les Halles, one of the biggest commercial malls in Europe, I heard birds singing,” he said. “I’d never realized there were birds at Les Halles of all places. It gave me hope.” “AS I’VE ROAMED PARIS, I’VE NOTICED THAT THE AIR IS MUCH FRESHER—THERE’S LESS POLLUTION.”—WILLIAM DANIELS, PHOTOGRAPHER…

One day after a temporary freeze on commercial flights and sea travel, nothing stirred at Yogyakarta International Airport. The new facility in Central Java was built to handle 20 million travelers a year. But less than a month after it formally opened in April, the government announced strict travel restrictions. Travel was halted into and out of Indonesia as COVID-19 spread around the world. The skies were, briefly, vacant. The airport reopened in August with the president’s promise it would be the nation’s busiest, once a COVID-19 vaccine was developed.…

Bronwyn Clifford, 16, stands with other Maori women on New Zealand’s Waitangi Day, which is observed each February to commemorate the Treaty of Waitangi, signed by some 500 Indigenous leaders and the British in 1840. Today Maori youth use social media to mobilize support for the return of ancestral land confiscated during the colonial era and to build momentum for the political partnership between Maori and Europeans envisaged by the treaty. “I STAND HERE IN THIS HOUSE TO HONOUR YOUR NAME, TO GIVE VOICE TO THE VOICELESS, WHO, FOR WHATEVER THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES, CANNOT SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.”—KIRITAPU ALLAN, MEMBER OF NEW ZEALAND PARLIAMENT…

As the sun sets, a curtain of rain descends from storm clouds near Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan. Far to the south, the city of Chicago has begun one of the world’s largest civil engineering projects, a massive tunnel and reservoir system to prevent raw sewage from discharging into the lake. The five Great Lakes contain more than a fifth of all the surface freshwater on Earth, and their shores, shaped by glaciers, have hosted humans for thousands of years.…

At the height of the pandemic in New York City, Kimberly Bonsignore learned that the hospital where she planned to give birth wasn’t allowing family members inside. She chose to have her baby at home, with her husband and toddler—and midwife Cara Muhlhahn and doula Angelique Clarke to help. Clarke set up a birthing pool in the family’s living room and texted Muhlhahn when Bonsignore’s water broke. In less than two hours, Suzette was born. The baby was unresponsive at first, but when Muhlhahn performed CPR, the newborn let out a wail. Moments later, they all heard the nightly sound of New Yorkers clapping to show their appreciation for first responders. “EVERY DAY WE TALK ABOUT IT. WE LOOK AT HER, AND SHE’S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL, HEALTHY GIRL. IT’S SO…

Whether through Zoom happy hours, backyard gatherings, or socially distanced walks, people have found ways during the pandemic to connect with the people they care about. “My daughter, Catalina, misses her friends very much, so we did the rounds in our car and visited her best friends from far away,” says Alessandra Sanguinetti. “Here she’s breaking the rules and touching fingertips with her best friend, Avery.”…

Ruddy Roye’s first assignment for National Geographic was to photograph people who donated artifacts to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in Washington, D.C., in 2016. “For me it was a huge deal,” Roye says, “because I was photographing people who have lived with Nat Turner’s Bible, they have lived with their ancestor’s free paper, they have lived with the clothes and belongings of James Baldwin. And finally, these items were going to be put in a space where they could be shared.” Roye recalls the assignment as “really tough” because many artifacts came with painful stories, and the items’ faithful guardians were now aged and infirm. “I felt honored and humbled by them,” Roye says. “Meeting Elaine Thompson, a person who had preserved her…

“Would you like a job? I need a photo of fire ants, clumping together to form a raft in a puddle of water.” Susan Welchman, a formidable and exacting photo editor, was offering a 2011 assignment to Anand Varma, who until then had only assisted veteran National Geographic photographers. With what they’d taught him, Varma felt ready to tackle the assignment. He told Welchman yes. When a fire ant colony gets flooded, the ants hook their feet to other ants’ bodies to create a buoyant mass, taking turns above and below the waterline. That’s the view Welchman wanted. At a Georgia Tech lab, Varma scooped ants into shallow water in a glass tank, watched the ants clump, and took scores of photos. Welchman rejected them as no better than amateur…

A mural of George Floyd next to the Swahili word haki, which means “justice,” was painted beside a marketplace in Nairobi’s Kibera community by artist Allan Mwangi. As demonstrations continued across the United States, Kenyans demanded justice for their own victims of police killings—and expressed solidarity with protest movements around the globe. From encouraging people to wear masks and wash their hands to organizing food drives, Kibera’s residents also united to fight COVID-19.…

The killing of George Floyd by city police officers ignited protests across the United States and around the world against police brutality. David Guttenfelder covered the demonstrations close to his home in Minneapolis. “There’s not one protester, not one attitude—it’s all driven by grief,” he says. “Grief over this man but also grief of a lifetime of this pain.” Four days after Floyd was killed, protesters set fire to the precinct building where the officers were stationed. The police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at the crowd. Amid the anger and chaos, Guttenfelder heard someone shouting: “We’re hurting. We’re hurting.” The following day, a protester received first aid after being struck near the eye during another clash.…

The pandemic caught many health-care systems short of emergency supplies, a situation exacerbated by uneven government responses to the crisis. Physician Gerald Foret dons a protective mask before seeing COVID-19 patients at Our Lady of the Angels Hospital in Bogalusa. The hospital was running low on N95 masks, so Foret used a spare respirator that was on hand. The full-face mask offered nearly complete protection from airborne particles when he entered the negative pressure unit where coronavirus patients were treated. “WITHOUT THE MASK, ENTERING THE ROOM COULD BE FATAL.”—MAX AGUILERAHELLWEG…

Financially, the pandemic landed hardest on low-income people. In India an estimated 139 million people are internal migrants, having moved from their rural homes to cities to work for daily wages. When the country went into lockdown, millions lost their jobs. Afraid of food shortages, many tried to return home. Public transportation was shut down, so they walked or biked or caught a ride on a truck, like this one near Lucknow. Eventually the government arranged for trains and buses to transport migrant workers. The International Labour Organization said the pandemic will push 400 million of India’s informal workers deeper into poverty. “IN THE CITIES THEY TREAT US LIKE STRAY DOGS. WHY WOULD THEY TREAT US ANY BETTER NOW?”—KRISHNA MOHAN, TEXTILE WORKER…

A priest in the northwestern Italian city of Novara blesses coffins arriving from Bergamo, one of the early centers of Italy’s outbreak. Morgues and crematoria were at capacity there, so the Italian Army was dispatched to move bodies elsewhere in the region to prepare them for cremation or burial. For some families, weeks went by before they found out where their deceased relatives had been taken. Funeral home employees became frontline workers, struggling to cope with the mental and physical toll of a virus that devastated their communities. “THIS HAS BEEN WORSE THAN A WAR. AT LEAST DURING A WAR, PEOPLE ARE ABLE TO RETURN THE REMAINS OF THE DEAD FOR A FUNERAL.”—ROBERTA MAGONI, A FUNERAL HOME ADMINISTRATOR IN BERGAMO PROVINCE…

Blood stains the ice where harp seals give birth in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Pups need solid ice to survive, but a warming world and shortage of stable ice in recent years have led to a rise in pup deaths. The situation could eventually prompt this population of harp seals to leave the gulf in search of increasingly elusive ice nurseries. “LIFE BORN TO ICE IS DIFFICULT, AND NATURAL MORTALITY IS HIGH. ADD A SEASON OF INCREASED TEMPERATURES AND DECREASING ICE AND YOU HAVE A DEADLY COMBINATION FOR THE PUPS.”—JENNIFER HAYES, ON THE HARP SEALS SHE PHOTOGRAPHS…

The body of a suspected coronavirus victim, wrapped in plastic, awaits a body bag in an Indonesian hospital. The multiple layers were part of a hospital protocol to help suppress the spread of the virus. As is the case with most victims, family members were not allowed to say goodbye. The uproar over this photo, first published in July by National Geographic, thrust photographer Joshua Irwandi into the spotlight. Celebrities and government officials in Indonesia had denied that COVID-19 was an issue in the country, which had lifted many social restrictions. This picture said otherwise. “It has galvanized and renewed discussions of COVID-19 in Indonesia just as the country was then preparing for a ‘new normal,’” said Irwandi. It laid bare a reality in a country where more than 200…

Taking a brief break during ceaseless frontline work treating patients with the coronavirus, nurses Caroline Quinet (at left) and Yasmina Cheroual rest outside CHU Ambroise Paré hospital. The pair, who had known each other for only a few months, pulled long shifts in the intensive care unit. Like many medical facilities around the world, Belgian hospitals initially were overwhelmed by a rush of patients with the virulent, ever changing new disease. These nurses, pulled from their standard duties, were thrown into full-time COVID-19 work—reinforcement troops for a long, exhausting battle. “NEVER WOULD I HAVE IMAGINED EXPERIENCING SOMETHING OF SUCH MAGNITUDE IN MY CAREER.”—YASMINA CHEROUAL…

Fatima Mohammad, 37, a Sudanese refugee, stands near her sleeping three-year-old son, Sami. Jordan hosts the second highest number of refugees per capita in the world, after Lebanon. More than 100,000 displaced people live in camps, while 542,700 live in cities and towns. These urban refugees have been hardest hit by the lockdown. Non-Syrian refugees in Jordan aren't allowed work permits and receive no financial support from Jordan’s government. As a result, refugees from countries such as Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia struggle to eke out a living. The day after this photo was taken, a three-day lockdown was announced to stem the spread of COVID-19, barring nonessential workers from leaving their homes.…

Tamaj Bulloch raises his small fist as Alena Battle of Charlotte, North Carolina, holds her son during the “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” Commitment March on Washington in August. Held on the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event drew thousands who risked the threat of COVID-19 to demand criminal justice reform and an end to police brutality. Speakers included the son and granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., and relatives of those killed by police.…

Datelle Straub (center) and friends Avery Lewis (left) and Titan Harness-Reed, graduates of Patrick Henry High School in Minneapolis, protested in their graduation caps and gowns following the killing of George Floyd. “Because of COVID we couldn’t walk the stage, so we decided to put our robes on to show that there is Black excellence in our community,” Straub said. When he saw police approaching, Straub lifted his diploma. “As we were walking, cops jumped out of a van and aimed their guns at me and my friends and put a red dot on our chests. It’s just frustrating that they are OK with killing the future.” “WE DECIDED TO PUT ON OUR ROBES TO SHOW THAT THERE IS BLACK EXCELLENCE IN OUR COMMUNITY. WE WALKED THE STREETS AS OUR…

The day before the U.S. election, supporters of Donald Trump wait for the president at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport in northeastern Pennsylvania. The rally took place not far from the childhood home of Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in the election. “The atmosphere was one of anticipation. It was one of the last rallies and the stakes were really high. People were scanning the sky for his arrival in Air Force One,” photographer Natalie Keyssar said.…

Some seven weeks into his stint aboard the ISS, Behnken (at left) and Chris Cassidy exited the station to conduct a space walk to install a toolbox for a Canadian Space Agency robot and perform other maintenance tasks. The five-and-a-half-hour exercise marked the 10th space walk for the veteran astronauts and the 300th by Americans. Hurley, Behnken’s partner on the Crew Dragon, snapped their photo from inside the ISS. Twelve days later, Behnken and Hurley ended their mission with a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.…

“IT’S HEARTENING TO SEE … A NATURAL SYSTEM THAT’S RECOVERING.”—BIOLOGIST ZACH WHITENER Alewives—a kind of river herring about 10 inches long—crowd Mill Brook on their way to spawn in Highland Lake, near Portland, Maine. Alewives are anadromous fish—they live in the ocean but migrate to freshwater to reproduce. Yet for more than 250 years, alewives and other migratory fish found their passage to the lake blocked by a dam on the Presumpscot River. In 2002 the dam was removed. Hoping to restore the migratory life cycle to the river system, biologists stocked Highland Lake with the fish. The alewives made their way from lake to brook to river to ocean and back again. The run of alewives has increased every year since and now numbers more than 60,000 fish. Their…

At the H Plus Yangji Hospital in Seoul, a walk-in testing clinic is set up like a row of phone booths to prevent contact between patients and medical staff. Nose and mouth swabs take less than three minutes, and test results can be returned in four to six hours. Experience with previous disease outbreaks prepared South Korea for the COVID-19 pandemic. The country already had a legal framework for contact tracing, and most residents stayed home and wore masks in public. The government worked with the private sector to swiftly ramp up testing. There are hundreds of testing sites throughout the country…

Jerry Lovett releases a dove to symbolize his brother Chester’s spirit. A retired Detroit mail carrier with 10 children, Chester died of COVID-19 complications. Under pandemic rules, only 10 people at a time could attend his funeral, but some of his family members were able to gather outside to watch the dove take flight. “MY BROTHER WOULD SAY, ‘I’LL BE BACK IN TWO OR THREE WEEKS,’ AND JUMP ON A MEGABUS FOR GEORGIA OR MISSISSIPPI OR SOMEWHERE. HE LIVED A GOOD LIFE. HE LOVED HIS 10 KIDS AND KEPT THEM ALL TOGETHER.”—JERRY LOVETT Subscriptions For subscriptions or changes of address, contact Customer Service at ngmservice.com or call 1-800-647-5463. Outside the U.S. or Canada call +1-515-237-3674. Contributions to the National Geographic Society are tax deductible under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S.…