After Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina in 2024, a community of ballad singers deepened their commitment to sustaining ballad singing for future generations.

Recent Supreme Court decisions dismantling the Voting Rights Act will disproportionately harm minority voters in the rural South.

When Barbara Miller was in elementary school, she covered her face while walking to class. “It hurt so bad to breathe. Your neck, your throat, your eyes,” Miller said. Doors that led to a breezeway got jammed with kids “[backing] up like cattle,” Miller said, because no one wanted to exit the school and enter the smog.

magine a slimy, speckled tube with four legs that appear to have been attached with spare parts. The toes—four on the front legs, five on the rear—resemble blown-up rubber gloves. The head is bumpy on top with a wide, flat mouth that curves into a smile. Hellbenders, giant salamanders that can reach more than two feet long in adulthood, have lived in Appalachia’s mountain streams for more than 150 million years. No one knows for sure how they earned their name, but folklore says early colonists believed the creatures were “from hell where they’re bent on returning.”