Includes bibliographical references.

Foreword -- Introduction -- A compassionate substance (from Lapham's Quarterly) / Philip Ball -- The search for alien life begins in earth's oldest desert (from The Atlantic) / Rebecca Boyle -- Glimpses of a mass extinction in modern-day western New York (from The New Yorker) / Peter Brannen -- This sand is your sand (from Outside) / Chris Colin -- The brain, reimagined (from Scientific American) / Dougals Fox -- Little golden flower-room: on wild places and intimacy (from The Millions) / Conor Gearin -- The endling: watching a species vanish in real time (from Pacific Standard) / Ben Goldfarb -- What if the placebo effect is not a trick? (from The New York Times Magazine) / Gary Greenberg -- The great rhino U-turn (from Mongabay) / Jeremy Hance -- The fading star: a constellation (from Lapham's Quarterly) / Holly Haworth -- Saving baby boy green (from Wired) / Eva Holland -- The fire at Eagle Creek (from Topic) / Apricot Irving -- Deleting a species (from Pacific Standard) / Rowan Jacobsen -- The insect apocalypse is here (from The New York Times Magazine) / Brooke Jarvis -- No heart, no moon (from The Southern Review) / Matt Jones -- The scientific detectives probing the secrets of ancient oracles (from Atlas Obscura) / Kevin Krajick -- Your really don't want to know what it's like to be a right whale these days (from Atlantic) / J.B. MacKinnon -- How extreme weather is shrinking the planet (from The New Yorker) / Bill McKibben -- The story of a face (from The New Yorker) / Rebecca Mead -- How to not die in America (from Splinter) / Molly Osberg -- Why paper jams persist (from The New Yorker) / Joshua Rothman -- The professor of horrible deeds (from The Chronicle of Higher Education) / Jordan Michael Smith -- Welcome to the center of the universe (from Longreads) / Shannon Stirone -- The hidden toll: why are black mothers and babies in the United States dying at more than double the rate of white mothers and babies? The answer has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America (from The New York Times Magazine) / Linda Vilarosa -- When the next plague hits (from The Atlantic) / Ed Yong -- Paper trails: living and dying with fragmented medical records (from Undark) / Ilana Yurkiewicz.