Field Notes Archives

Letter From Mancos, Colorado: Seeking Sanctuary in Trump Country

Even under the hardline policies of President Donald Trump—which resulted in a 25 percent increase in deportation arrests from 2016 to 2017—ICE officers largely avoid churches, mosques, and synagogues.

Krista Langlois

Field Notes: A Scene From Pyarpur, India

Pyarpur, India: In Jharkhand, one of the poorest states in India, gangs recruit young boys for work as robbers across the country.

Pacific Standard Staff

Field Notes: A Controlled Avalanche in Southern Switzerland

Arbaz, Switzerland: A controlled avalanche, started with dynamite, slides down a mountain in the Swiss canton of Valais.

Pacific Standard Staff

Letter From Qaanaaq, Greenland: The Man Who Listens for Nuclear Tests Above the Arctic

Svend Erik had not intended to spend the last 37-odd years of his life permanently in Qaanaaq, stewarding critical data through decades of changes in computing and communications technologies, but he had fallen in love.

Elmo Keep

Field Notes: Inside a Ravaged Building in Northern Iraq

Haji Ali, Iraq: A view of the village—which has been ravaged by battles against ISIS—through one of its destroyed buildings.

Pacific Standard Staff

Giant figures sculptured in granite rock on Stone Mountain in Atlanta, Georgia. The figures represent Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America with Confederate Generals Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

Letter From Stone Mountain, Georgia: Reclaiming Stone Mountain From the Alt-Right

How Stone Mountain—the world's largest and most immovable Confederate monument—could become a battlefield where neo-Confederates from across the country make their last stand.

Tony Rehagen

Field Notes: Morning at the Buriganga River in Bangladesh

Dhaka, Bangladesh: Momin Mohammad, a leather worker, brushes his teeth by a canal near his home in the city's polluted Hazaribagh neighborhood. Each day, tanneries dump 22,000 liters of toxic waste into the Buriganga, the capital city's main river and key water supply.

Pacific Standard Staff

Field Notes

Letter From Mancos, Colorado: Seeking Sanctuary in Trump Country

Field Notes: A Scene From Pyarpur, India

Field Notes: A Controlled Avalanche in Southern Switzerland

Letter From Qaanaaq, Greenland: The Man Who Listens for Nuclear Tests Above the Arctic

Field Notes: Inside a Ravaged Building in Northern Iraq

Letter From Stone Mountain, Georgia: Reclaiming Stone Mountain From the Alt-Right

Field Notes: Morning at the Buriganga River in Bangladesh

Field Notes: An Abandoned Forest in Eastern Tanzania

Letter From Shibuya, Tokyo: When Home Is an Internet Cafe

Field Notes: Skid Marks on a Frozen Lake in Siberia