An Army of Women: Read Amy Davidson on the end of the ban on women in combat, plus a slideshow of servicewomen through history: http://nyr.kr/UoffRs

(Source: newyorker.com)

Jessie Wender:

On the last day of 2012, the photographer Magda Biernat-Webster and her husband, the illustrator Ian Webster, began a journey in Chile that they’re calling North via South: from Antarctica to Alaska. After landing in Santiago, Chile, via New York City via Williamsburg, they drove fifteen hundred miles south, through Chile, to catch a cruise boat headed to Antarctica, which will be the official starting point of their voyage. Over the coming months, we’ll be following their journey and publishing dispatches from road, boat, and plane.

Click-through for a selection of Magda’s photographs from Chile, with captions from the couple: http://nyr.kr/WefYVR

(Source: newyorker.com)

Photographer Moises Saman has been covering the Arab Spring and its repercussions since the revolution’s inception in Tunisia, 2010. Of the Egyptian Revolution, Saman says, “The past two years in Egyptian politics have been like a turbulent soap opera, playing out on the streets of Cairo for all the world to see… the next act in this political theatre might be the hardest to predict.” Click-through for a slideshow of his photographs: http://nyr.kr/WTesFr

(Source: newyorker.com)

In this context of the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Brian L. Frank’s new body of photographs, “Dreamscape,” made during a six-week-long road trip across the country this past summer, are particularly resonant. Frank sought to explore the notion of American identity in a journey that took him from Virginia to his home base of San Francisco, against the backdrop of the Presidential race. “I kept thinking about how politicians always said the same things and tried to use Americans’ views of themselves to their advantage,” Frank told me. “And I began looking for the commonalities in this shared sense of the American ‘self.’ ” 

Despite the drastic changes between landscapes and cultures across the United States, Frank believes that, in the end, there is more that holds the country together than cleaves it apart.

(Source: newyorker.com)

For the winter holiday, here is a selection of pictures by Martin Parr, master of the leisure-class photograph—from indoor skiing in Dubai to the mountain resorts of Switzerland: http://nyr.kr/TlRzws

Last weekend, Kendrick Brinson visited Sun City, Arizona, an age-restricted community for retirees, near Phoenix. The city was built over a ghost town, in 1960, and was the first of its kind in the U.S. Brinson, who is based in Atlanta, first visited Sun City three years ago, in advance of Sun City’s fiftieth anniversary. On this, her eighth visit, she brought her iPhone, and posted a selection of her photos to The New Yorker’s Instagram feed.  Click-through for a slideshow: http://nyr.kr/T619U0

(Source: newyorker.com)

Click-through to read Emily Greenhouse on the 850th anniversary celebration of Notre Dame Cathedral, plus a vintage slideshow: http://nyr.kr/Teof9x

(Source: newyorker.com)

A month ago today, Hurricane Sandy blew up the East Coast, leaving behind wreckage, from torn-up beaches to battered city streets. The photographers Peter van Agtmael, Adrian Fussell, and others captured the storm and its aftermath for The New Yorker. Click-through for a look back at what they saw: http://nyr.kr/U53AlF

(Source: newyorker.com)

Last week, the photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind took over The New Yorker’s Instagram account, documenting a long weekend in the English countryside with Camilla Naprous, a twenty-five-year-old rider and horse master and part of the stunt team The Devil’s Horsemen. For the past two years, the team has worked on the HBO series “Game of Thrones.” Anastasia caught up with them at the family farm in Buckinghamshire.
Click-through for a selection of her photos: http://nyr.kr/ShMP9B

For this week’s Food Issue, the duo TrujilloPaumier spent two days photographing the markets, restaurants, and cuisine of Oaxaca for Calvin Trillin’s piece “Land of the Seven Moles.” “Oaxaca is a culinary explosion of past memories. When enjoying a chile relleno in the market, I can hear my sisters and mother talking; my mother questioning my sisters if they have put enough piloncillo or canela in the atole, or her calling Eva for more leña. These memories are confronting and familiar beyond belief,” Joaquin Trujillo, who spent his childhood in Ermita de Guadalupe, Mexico, told us. … Brian Paumier told us, “To eat in Oaxaca is eating how the Tolteca ate a thousand years ago—nothing has changed much but the introduction of European livestock. I am always first in line for the culinary time machine called Oaxaca.”

For more from the photographers, and a selection of their photographs: http://nyr.kr/Y1cSYx