A PEEK INSIDE THE WORLD’S GREATEST RECORD STORE

BY RICHARD GRANT; PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON VARNEY SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | July/August 2021 I first heard about Val Shively—a legendary figure among serious record collectors—from a friend of mine in Philadelphia named Aaron Levinson. He’s a Grammy-winning music producer, composer, DJ and rare vinyl collector who has been buying records from Shively for 40 years. “He has a store…

THE WOLF THAT DISCOVERED CALIFORNIA

Nearly a century after the last wolf was eradicated in the state, a lone female arrived and established a pack. Not everyone is cheering BY RICHARD GRANT; PHOTOGRAPHS BY MORGAN HEIM At a steady trot, wolves can go 20 miles without breaking stride and cover 50 miles in a day. Their long thin legs move with…

THE LOST HISTORY OF YELLOWSTONE

After 14 summers excavating in Yellowstone National Park, Doug MacDonald has a simple rule of thumb. “Pretty much anywhere you’d want to pitch a tent, there are artefacts,” he says, holding up a 3,000-year-old obsidian projectile point that his team has just dug out of the ground. “Like us, Native Americans liked to camp on…

A Short History on American Bragging

On swaggering exaggerations and crowing overstatements, on drum beats and tweets and paragraph-long diatribes. From the Mississippi Delta to Trump Tower, Richard Grant writes a history of American grandstanding, eloquence and excess In west London, where I grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the idea of boasting about yourself was almost unthinkable.…

Do Trees Talk to Each Other?

Do Trees Talk to Each Other? I’m walking in the Eifel Mountains in western Germany, through cathedral-like groves of oak and beech, and there’s a strange unmoored feeling of entering a fairy tale. The trees have become vibrantly alive and charged with wonder. They’re communicating with one another, for starters. They’re involved in tremendous struggles…