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Kyle Worl is an Alaska Native athlete, coach, and cultural advocate who has spent most of his life competing in, and helping pass on, Arctic Sports and Traditional Games. He’s earned more than 100 medals, been named an Outstanding Athlete multiple times at the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, and competed in Traditional Games throughout the circumpolar North. He’s even competed on American Ninja Warrior. But as important as all that is, a big part of his life now is making sure the games continue with the generations coming up behind him. Through coaching, he’s helping rebuild Juneau’s Native Youth Olympics program and creating opportunities for a new generation of athletes to learn the games. That means advocating for their growth, while making sure the culture, history, and sense of community at the heart of the games aren’t lost along the way. Kyle’s dad, Rod Worl—who competed in Arctic Sports in the 1980s and ’90s—introduced him to the games. He was an accomplished athlete, too. In fact, for almost 40 years, he held the world record for the Knuck Hop—a game that leaves your knuckles bloody and your body exhausted. These days, Kyle reflects on what it took for his dad to push himself that far—to establish a record that was only recently beaten—and how differently he understands that accomplishment now that he’s tested those same physical and mental limits. It’s a lot to think about, especially when you consider that these games carry histories much older than the competitions themselves. Their movements grew out of life in the North—hunting, communicating, testing endurance, and preparing the body and mind for an environment where those abilities mattered. So, every time these games are taught to another athlete, they pass along something that goes beyond technique: a connection to people, place, and lifeways.

For nearly 30 years, Doug Vandegraft has been writing about bars in Alaska. In his book, “A Guide to the Notorious Bars of Alaska,” he uses the state’s longtime watering holes as a way into its broader social history. Doug spent decades traveling throughout Alaska during his career as a federal cartographer, and along the way he became interested in the bars that seemed to function as more than just places to drink—they were gathering places, landmarks, and repositories of local history. He eventually spent years researching their histories, digging through liquor licenses, newspapers, business records, and archives, while visiting bars and talking with the people who owned them, worked in them, and drank in them. The result is a history of Alaska told from the barstool, where stories of gold rushes, fishing, military expansion, Prohibition, boom-and-bust economies, and colorful characters all come together in the places people gathered at the end of the day. When Doug moved to Anchorage in 1983, one of the things that struck him was just how many bars there were—and how each one seemed to have its own identity. If you liked reggae, there was a bar for that. If you liked blues, rock and roll, or country, there was a bar for that, too. And these weren’t just weekend destinations. Bars could be crowded any night of the week, something Doug came to see as a reflection of an Alaska economy where jobs were plentiful and people had money to spend. That early experience shaped the way he came to understand bars as reflections of the communities around them, places where music, work, personality, and local culture all came together. And after visiting more than a hundred of them, he developed a simple rule for walking into any bar, no matter how unfamiliar: act like you’ve been there before.

Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer, and experimental philosopher, and his work uses imagination to question some of our most basic assumptions about how the world works. His new book, “A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance,” looks beyond human societies for new ways of thinking about politics, drawing lessons from bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and entire ecosystems. At the heart of the book is a simple idea: humans didn’t invent governance. Living things have been organizing, cooperating, competing, and adapting to one another for billions of years, and Jonathon argues that we might have something to learn from them. He asks us to reconsider what intelligence looks like, who—or what—we're willing to learn from, and ultimately, what our place is within the natural world. In “A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance,” Jonathon takes that idea and asks what it might actually mean for the way we govern ourselves. Bacteria become models for collective decision-making, lichens offer lessons about cooperation and conflict, and other species challenge our assumptions about hierarchy, resilience, and even democracy. Jonathon calls this approach “political biomimicry”—looking to the strategies that have evolved throughout nature and considering how they might inspire new approaches to human politics. It's an imaginative way of thinking about some very real problems, and one that asks us to reconsider whether humans should always be the only ones setting the terms. Photo courtesy of The Berggruen Institute

Joseph Dahmen is an architect and the founder of the Biogenic Architecture Lab at the University of British Columbia. The lab’s lead designer, Isobel McLean, also joins this conversation. She works at the intersection of architecture, microbiology, and biofabrication. And together, Joseph and Isobel are experimenting with mycelium—the vast network of fungal threads that grows through soil, wood, and other organic matter. They’re looking at its potential as a building material that can be grown rather than manufactured. For example, when grown through sawdust and other plant fibers, mycelium acts as a natural binder, creating a solid, biodegradable material that can provide insulation, a lot like conventional foam. This work is practical and speculative, and it asks whether the materials of the future might be cultivated, allowed to change over time, and eventually returned to the earth.  Mycelium could be especially useful in northern communities, where the logistics of construction can be complicated and expensive. And in many ways, those communities magnify problems that exist throughout the construction industry in general—rising transportation costs, dependence on long supply chains, material waste, and the carbon emissions associated with producing and moving building materials. So, Joseph, Isobel, and their team of architects and scientists are imagining a different model—one where communities could eventually grow useful materials closer to where they’re needed, using locally available resources to create products appropriate to a particular region and climate. Materials that don’t have to travel as far to get where they need to go, and that, at the end of their useful lives, can biodegrade rather than become another permanent layer of waste.

Author Lily Tuzroyluke is from Tikiġaq, also known as Point Hope, a community on Alaska's northwest coast that has been home to generations of people for thousands of years. It’s widely regarded as one of the oldest, continuously lived-in settlements in North America. As a writer, Lily often begins by imagining the land itself—not as it exists today, but as it existed centuries ago—meditating on everything a single place has witnessed across time. Then comes the research, uncovering the details that help bridge imagination and the historical record, giving shape and substance to the images that first arrived in her mind. In that way, storytelling becomes more than preservation, it becomes an act of reclamation, restoring voices that have too often been left out of Alaska's history. In her debut novel, Sivulliq: Ancestor, Lily imagines a mother and her children fleeing their homeland after it was devastated by smallpox. They set out across the ice, moving north to the coast, where they become whalers, adapting the knowledge and traditions their ancestors developed to hunt mammoths to harvesting the bowhead whale. But along the way, they’re attacked by whalers, who leave the mother for dead and kidnap the daughter. What follows is a story of loss, love, and survival, and it’s shaped by Lily's connection to Point Hope. This is an important distinction from many of the other people who have written about Point Hope. Very few of them were actually from the community and intimately familiar with its people, its traditions, and the land. But Lily is.

Corinna Cook is an essayist whose writing follows the stories embedded in the borderlands of Southeast Alaska, northern British Columbia, and the southern Yukon. Drawing from history, natural science, and personal experience, she asks what the landscape can teach us—how it preserves memory, how climate reshapes our understanding of place, and how the painful histories of colonialism continue to shape life in the present. Her essays remind us that history and the natural world are inseparable, that the past lingers in rivers, forests, permafrost, and the traces left behind by those who came before us. And rather than searching for tidy conclusions, she approaches each essay as an open question, using it to better understand the North, the stories preserved in its landscapes, and what it means to live within the long arc of geologic time. Her recent book, Permafrost Is an Archive, is a collection of essays about turning toward the land. Moving through the boreal forest, thawing permafrost, and the invisible lines that divide nations, she asks what the land remembers and what it can teach us about the painful histories we carry, the ones that continue to shape how we see each other and the world around us. She doesn't offer easy answers. Instead, her essays become meditations on home and displacement, deep time and human history, and the difficult work of building more honest relationships with each other. As climate change reshapes the North, she argues that our ability to adapt may depend as much on how we confront our shared histories as on how we respond to environmental change. At the heart of the book is a question that echoes throughout her work: Now that we know, what do we do with that knowledge?

Tom Kortbeek and Roos Meerman are the founders of Fillip Studios, a Netherlands-based interdisciplinary design studio whose work sits at the intersection of art, science, technology, and human experience. Together, Tom and Roos have spent more than a decade exploring what happens when artists, designers, engineers and scientists are invited into the same conversation. Their projects explore everything from human connection to healthcare to public ethics, environmental responsibility, and the future role of design in society. There’s Tactile Orchestra, an interactive installation that turns touch into collaborative music; there’s Kozie, a sensory object that’s being used in dementia and Alzheimer's care; Holland's Next Embryo invites the public to grapple with the ethical questions surrounding reproductive technology and genetic selection; Commissioned by Earth explores what changes when the planet itself is treated as the client; Arabidopsis Symphony transforms plant biology into an immersive musical experience. And other projects that challenge audiences to reconsider the relationship between people, nature, materials, technology, and the systems that shape our lives. But beneath all of those projects is a simpler question: How do people come together? Not through argument or instruction, but through touch, play, curiosity, wonder, and shared experience. It's a question that sits at the center of much of Fillip Studios' work and is reflected in its guiding philosophy: Impact Through Wonder. In the studio, this starts with creating an atmosphere where creators are comfortable to explore and discover. Here, Tom and Roos’ role involves helping people work through a creative process, uncovering new questions and perspectives along the way. The result is a body of work that invites people to come together, and that some of our most meaningful insights aren't always something we think our way into, they can also be something we feel our way toward.

Anchorage Historian David Reamer has spent years digging through archives, newspapers, and forgotten corners, recovering stories that might otherwise disappear. From his early days of sharing historical stories on social media to his long-running Histories of Alaska column in the Anchorage Daily News, he’s documented everything from vanished neighborhoods and local legends to racial covenants, labor struggles, oddball characters, and the everyday moments that shaped Alaska's largest city. His work reminds us that history doesn’t just live in textbooks or monuments. It survives in fragments — rumors, newspaper clippings, photographs, old advertisements, property records, fading memories, and oral histories. Through those fragments, he explores what Anchorage's past reveals about its present and what it means to preserve the memory of a city that has spent much of its life reinventing itself. Anchorage is difficult to define because it never stops changing. It was founded in 1915 as a railroad tent city—a place of laborers, opportunists, and people eager to get in on the ground floor. More than a century later, that spirit of reinvention remains. The challenge in seeing the full picture, David says, is that we rarely see the present clearly while we're living through it. Only with distance do the patterns emerge. So, he’s skeptical of the neat narratives that often follow official histories because, for him, history is messy. And he embraces that messiness, challenging conventional wisdom and uncovering histories that are both profound and absurd.  Like Anchorage's brief obsession with raising chinchillas.

Ashley Saupe is the host of the Sharp End Podcast, a show built around firsthand accounts of accidents, near misses, survival, and the complicated psychology of risk in the outdoors. But before she started the podcast, she was studying the mistakes of others, reading Accidents in North American Climbing, an annual publication by the American Alpine Club that documents climbing incidents, what went wrong, and the lessons people take away from them. She became fascinated not by triumphs or summit photos, but by the thin line between routine and disaster—the small decisions, overlooked details, and human tendencies that can shift a situation toward danger. Eventually, she began to think: someone should turn these stories into a podcast. That idea became The Sharp End.  For more than eleven years, she’s been listening to people recount moments when things fell apart, and in the process her own relationship to climbing, risk, and the outdoors has changed. In her twenties and early thirties, she was more concerned with reaching the summit, but now, as she nears 40, she’s learned to enjoy the journey. These days, success means facilitating wilderness experiences for other people and getting down safely. She’s less interested in collecting accomplishments than she is in what the outdoors reveal about fear, ego, vulnerability, and identity. Now, she often spends time alone in the backcountry, where the silence and isolation force her to confront these things directly. She says time slows down in the mountains, that survival depends on paying attention: listening to your body, the weather, your partner, the rock in front of you. That way of moving through the outdoors has also shaped the way she thinks about Alaska, how it’s scale and mythology often distorts people’s judgment and can lead to a dangerous kind of confidence. Many people refer to this as “The Alaska Factor.”

Sue Aikens is the warden of Kavik River Camp, a remote, self-sufficient outpost on Alaska’s North Slope. A collection of bunkhouses, fuel tanks, generators and equipment set against a wide, treeless, and unforgiving landscape defined by wind, cold, and distance. Just open ground, shifting weather, and a constant awareness that survival depends on preparation and respect for the elements. Hunters, scientists, photographers, and adventurers all travel there for work and pleasure, and it’s Sue’s job to help them navigate the landscape and prepare for whatever they came there to do. She’s spent nearly 30 years of her life here, long enough to know it down to the smallest detail. Every rock, every barrel, every bend in the river. And for more than a decade of that time, she’s shared her life with the world in Life Below Zero, a reality show that gives people a glimpse into what it takes to live in the Arctic. In her new book, North of Ordinary, she writes about a difficult upbringing, abuse, abandonment, resilience, and the unlikely path that led her to Kavik. And what emerges from that story isn’t just about survival, it’s a way of thinking. About solitude, about fear, and about what it means to rely on yourself when there’s no one else around. Like the time she was attacked by a grizzly who was trying to assert dominance around Kavik, at one point biting down on her head so hard she could hear her skull crack. After the bear left her for dead, she crawled back to camp and lay there for days until help eventually arrived. The injuries that resulted from that attack left her rebuilding her body piece by piece. It’s the kind of experience that would send most people running. But rather than pushing her away, it seemed to root her even deeper in that place. She had survived. And for Sue, survival isn’t just relief — it’s proof that she belongs in Kavik.

Caroline Van Hemert is a wildlife biologist, writer, and researcher whose work moves between science, story, and the lived experience of wild places. She’s based in Alaska, where she’s spent years studying migratory birds and the shifting ecosystems they move through, paying close attention to how climate change is reshaping patterns that have existed for generations. She’s also the author of “The Sun Is a Compass,” a memoir that traces a 4,000-mile journey she and her husband made from Washington State to Arctic Alaska under their own power—by boat, ski, canoe, and foot. Across her work, whether in the field or on the page, she’s asking a version of the same question: how do we find our way through a changing world, and what can the natural world teach us about movement, attention, and belonging? Caroline’s writing merges the personal with the scientific, a perspective shaped by her early research into beak deformities in black-capped chickadees. That work led to a broader focus on wildlife health, studying everything from parasites in polar bears to harmful algal blooms and their effects on seabirds — and how disease, toxicants, and environmental stress ripple across entire ecosystems. Because a change to one species is never isolated, it’s a community-level shift. For a long time, that work felt heavy, like serving as a gatekeeper at the morgue, documenting decline. But more recently her focus has begun to shift. In her new book, tentatively titled “Upwellings,” she looks for moments of surprise, places where the natural world resists the expected ending. Because she believes that by recognizing what’s possible in the wild can reshape what feels possible within us. It’s a shift that also reflects a deeper question about science itself: whether data alone can still move people, or whether it requires a more engaged, more human voice.

Don Rearden is an author and an educator whose work is rooted in Alaska—its landscapes, its communities, and the complex realities shaping life across the North. His writing—both fiction and nonfiction—blends elements of survival, culture, and environmental change. Whether he’s exploring a pandemic unfolding in the Arctic or a coastal village on the brink of relocation, his work is grounded in lived experience and respect for place. That respect comes from his upbringing in Southwestern Alaska. He says he’s haunted by it, in a good way. Looking into homes left behind after an epidemic, running a dogsled team out across the ice to set a fish trap, how there was only one telephone in his entire community. Images like these he can return to anytime, not just for inspiration, but as a way of staying connected to where he comes from.  He jokes that writing is his drug of choice because he’s able to step outside his body, away from old injuries and the noise of the world, and can move freely through story. It’s something he’s always turned to as an escape. It’s his way of traveling back to his youth in Southwestern Alaska, back to the tundra, the mountains, and the places that have defined him. It’s a place where survival wasn’t abstract, it was part of daily life. That time in a tight-knit community and nature has been a constant reminder of how much he still has to learn. It's also a reminder that Alaska isn’t a place of extraction, but a place rich with stories, culture, and meaning. Across his writing, he returns to these themes again and again. There’s survival, love, an appreciation for the fleeting nature of time, and a kind of magic rooted in the mystery of the world. He says that for too long these stories have been told from the Outside, but now it’s time they’re told from within.

Sam Davenport writes the AK IRL newsletter. It dissects Alaska reality television as entertainment and as a cultural lens that shapes how Alaska is perceived from the Outside — an idea often signaled right from the start in show titles filled with buzzwords like wild, survival, and frontier. As if there’s a checklist for how Alaska gets branded and sold. She writes about the manufactured drama, the narrative structure, the way reality TV can feel like a funhouse mirror — recognizable, but distorted. And yet, within that distortion, there are moments of truth. Shows like Deadliest Catch have introduced millions of viewers to the commercial fishing industry, offering glimpses into lives they might otherwise never encounter. There’s a reason people keep watching these reality shows about Alaska: there’s a fascination with remoteness, solitude, escapism, and the idea of living outside the noise.  But Sam also looks at what gets left out of these shows. The recurring image of Alaska as an empty, unpeopled wilderness erases the Alaska Native communities who have lived on and stewarded this land for thousands of years. She points to how exaggeration, assumption, and spectacle can flatten the complexity of a place into something consumable, and how that flattening has consequences. Some shows approach that responsibility with more care than others, but the broader pattern of Alaska as novelty, extremity, and myth persists. From fishing boats to gold mines to even dating shows, the state has become a stage where outsiders project their fantasies. And what Sam’s newsletter does is turn that image back onto itself, reflecting both Alaska and the assumptions and expectations of the people watching it.

Julia O’Malley is a journalist, a cook, a baker, and lately she’s been researching and re-creating Cold War cakes. During the Cold War era—roughly the decades between the end of World War II and the early 1990s—cake mix transformed a food once associated with luxury into something democratic, something anyone could make at home. Julia says that those boxed mixes, and the recipes people built around them in the ‘70s and ‘80s, are more than just dessert. They’re cultural artifacts that reveal how women navigated creativity, expectation, and changing ideas about domestic life. They reflect a moment when women were entering the national conversation from within domestic space. Experimenting, adapting, and reshaping expectations. That shift raised a question inside the kitchen itself: What happens when packaged ingredients, appliances, and new food technologies promise women time—time to work, to control their finances, and to claim a larger role in public life? In Alaska, where fresh ingredients were often scarce and communities had long relied on shelf-stable foods, brought in through supply chains and institutional systems, cake mixes made a lot of sense. For generations, Alaskans have adapted to what’s available—working with canned goods, powdered ingredients, and foods designed to travel long distances before reaching the table. A box of cake mix fit easily into that reality. Julia has been tracing these stories through old cookbooks and community recipes, even digging into ones from boomtown Fairbanks in 1909, to understand how something as ordinary as cake can tell us about women’s lives, shifting ideas of feminism, and the creativity that unfolded in Cold War kitchens. Because food, Julia says, is always a story. It’s one of history, origin, climate, and longing. And in the Cold War kitchen, when the threat of nuclear annihilation hovered in the background of daily life, even something as simple as baking a cake could feel like a small act of reassurance.

Jeremie McGowan is an artist, designer, and researcher. Amund Sjolie Sveen is an artist. And together, they created Real. Arctic., an exhibition that examines how the word “Arctic” is used in branding, institutions, geopolitics, and everyday consumer products — and how the use of that word shapes what we think we know about the arctic. Their work blurs the line between critique and commodity, asking who gets to define the Arctic, who profits from it, and what gets flattened in the process. Throughout the exhibition, the work shifts form — from displays of “Pure Arctic” deodorant to an expanding archive of Arctic-branded objects — asking viewers to reconsider what is real and what has been manufactured. It explores how art and design can both construct and unravel powerful narratives about place, and what responsibility comes with working inside those systems. Jeremie and Amund collect and document products from around the world that call themselves “Arctic,” or borrow the image, the light, or the myth of the Arctic to sell something. Even when those products have no connection to the place itself. Deodorants that promise Arctic purity, chewing gum that offers polar freshness, outdoor brands that are marketed around rugged endurance and masculine extremes. Again and again, the Arctic appears as clean, untouched, and invigorating — a blank canvas for refreshment or conquest. As Jeremie points out, much of that marketing is driven by an outsider fantasy: the idea that you’re the first, the only one to witness the wilderness or the Northern Lights, even as that experience is packaged and sold en masse. Amund says that the Arctic’s power as a word may lie in its perceived remoteness. Because it feels unknown, it can be filled with whatever we want it to mean. And in that process, the realities of the place itself and the people who live there often fall away and what remains is a brand. And then, beneath all of that, is a deeper question about power: who gets to define a place, and whose version of that place becomes the story that guides our understanding of it.