Michael Finkel’s Journalism

Down in the hold, beneath the deck boards, where we were denied most of the sun’s light but none of its fire, it sometimes seemed as if there were nothing but eyes. The boat was twenty-three feet long, powered solely by two small sails. There were forty-one people below and...

A little before noon on the last day of his life, fifteen-year-old Ahmed Abutayeh invented a toothache. This was the first time he had ever complained of a health problem in school, so his science teacher wrote him a permission slip to visit a nearby clinic. Ahmed shouldered his plaid-patterned...

Our star, the sun, will die a quiet death. The sun's of only average mass, starwise, and after burning through the last of its hydrogen fuel in about five billion years, its outer layers will drift away

After four years on dialysis, with no sign that he was nearing the top of the transplant waiting list, Moshe Tati decided to buy a kidney. This was easier than he had imagined. Several months previous, the name and telephone number of an organ broker had been passed, furtively, around...

“Hell,” says Mousaka. He raises a forefinger and circles it in the air, to indicate that he is referring to the whole of the void. I am sitting on Mousaka’s lap. Mousaka is sitting on Osiman’s lap. Osiman is sitting on someone else’s lap. And so on — everybody sitting...

Naji received his first letter from Ali in early July of 2001. It was delivered by a man on a donkey. The man rode from the Northern Alliance positions in the brown hills outside the city of Taloqan, in northeastern Afghanistan, then across the dusty battle plains, and then farther,...

They had a radio, just a single battery-powered radio, so the news traveled by word of mouth up and down the footpaths of Abdulgan, village to village, until everyone knew. They knew what was happening elsewhere in Afghanistan. And therefore the people of Abdulgan not only suffered, they suffered with...

The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. “You’re going to leave it that far from the curb?” he asks. He’s standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I...

“I’m hungry,” says Onwas, squatting by his fire, blinking placidly through the smoke. The men beside him murmur in assent. It’s late at night, deep in the East African bush...

A crewman on a commercial tuna-fishing boat was the first to spot it: something shiny and metallic in the water off the ship’s bow. The crewman alerted the navigator, and the 280-foot San Nikunau slightly altered course to avoid a collision...

The Khan dreams of a car. Never mind that there isn’t a road. His father, the previous Khan, spent his life lobbying for a road. The new Khan does the same. A road, he argues, would permit doctors, and their medicines, to easily reach them. Then maybe all the dying...

These are my final words: “Why a camp chair?” I speak them to a man named Wade. Wade from Minnesota. I’m in line behind him, waiting to enter the Dhamma Giri meditation center, in the quiet hill country of western India, for the official start of the 10-day course. Wade...