One day, the British environmental writer George Monbiot was digging in his garden when he had a revelation — that his life had become too tidy and constrained. While exploring what it would take to re-ignite his own sense of wonder, he waded into a sea of ideas about restoration and rewilding that so captured his imagination that it became the focus of his next book. Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding was published in the United Kingdom in 2013, to much acclaim, and is forthcoming in the U.S. in 2014. Orion editor Jennifer Sahn caught up with Monbiot to talk about rewilding—what it means for people, for nature, and for an environmental movement that is in great need of having far wider appeal...

A midnight blue Chevy rolls slowly down a snow-covered street, an emergency strobe light on its roof and a sign on its side that promises this is “official business.” At each house, business, even vacant lot, workers in the car pause to decide whether someone lives there and what shape the place is in before snapping a photo and beaming it to “mission control” miles away...

The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses...

...It was a secret fraternity, founded at the beginning of the Great Depression, that functioned as a sort of one-percenter’s Friars Club. Each year, the group’s dinner features comedy skits, musical acts in drag, and off-color jokes, and its group’s privacy mantra is “What happens at the St. Regis stays at the St. Regis.” For eight decades, it worked. No outsider in living memory had witnessed the entire proceedings firsthand...

Peter Brown, the Beatles' manager, on the band's conquest of America...

"There are times when you lose your narrative or get tired of it. Then it takes a while to figure out what the new one is."

Last autumn, Kim Gordon held a retrospective exhibition of her visual art at the New York gallery White Columns. One project, Noise Painting, featured the names of experimental rock bands written in thick, dripping black paint. Most of them hung on the wall, as you'd expect, but one was scrunched up on the floor as if it had been torn down in a rage. That one said Sonic Youth. You don't have to be an art critic to appreciate the symbolism...

NFL star Vernon Davis finally made it to Sochi to fulfill his roll as honorary captain of the U.S. Olympic curling team Saturday when he showed up to watch the women compete with the Swedes...“The thing that intrigues me about curling is that it’s so competitive from a thinking standpoint,” Davis told the Associated Press after the match. “You really have to use your mind, really come up with a good strategy to defeat your opponent. …And curling helps me when it comes to the game of football.”...

On February 15th the definitive, massive, comprehensive catalogue of Picasso's works will be published -- again -- thanks to Cahiers d'Art and its new owner. Sarah Moroz on the rebirth of a famous publishing house, gallery, and art journal...

...The moment is ripe for her to be restored to us, depixified and complex. And so she has been in a swift, cool but empathetic new biography called “Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore,” by Linda Leavell...

Cowley (1898-1989) wasn’t a bad poet. His best verse is collected in a volume called “Blue Juniata” (1985). But we can be grateful that relative poverty mostly forced him to put poetry aside. He was more adept in almost every other arena: as a critic, historian, editor, journalist and translator, a “one-man assembly line,” in the words of a colleague. Cowley was also perhaps the greatest literary cross-pollinator of the 20th century. It’s impossible to imagine the American canon without him...