In SAPIENS’ final year of publishing new stories, the magazine honors 10 standout contributions that carried anthropology into the hearts and minds of readers worldwide.
16 Dec 2025
✽
As SAPIENS publishes its final stories, we reflect with gratitude on the remarkable community of anthropologists, journalists, poets, and readers who have made the magazine a home for exploring humanity in all its complexity. In 2025, our contributors wrote about connection and care, loss and return, the voices and conditions that shape us, and the landscapes that hold our histories. More than 3…
In SAPIENS’ final year of publishing new stories, the magazine honors 10 standout contributions that carried anthropology into the hearts and minds of readers worldwide.
16 Dec 2025
✽
As SAPIENS publishes its final stories, we reflect with gratitude on the remarkable community of anthropologists, journalists, poets, and readers who have made the magazine a home for exploring humanity in all its complexity. In 2025, our contributors wrote about connection and care, loss and return, the voices and conditions that shape us, and the landscapes that hold our histories. More than 3 million readers joined us in this collective journey of understanding. As we close this chapter, the SAPIENS editorial team—Bridget Alex, Amanda Lichtenstein, Ben Schacht, Emily Sekine, Christine Weeber, and myself—offers 10 standout pieces that capture the spirit of what the magazine has always sought to do, illuminate what it means to be human.
—Chip Colwell, Editorial Director
Human Rights
CREATIVE NONFICTION
By Monica J. Casper
In a time of heightened threats to reproductive rights, a women’s health scholar and mother of two comes face to face with her uterus.
Viewpoint
Crossroads
How Societies Morph With the Seasons
By Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias
An evolutionary anthropologist details seasonal changes among foraging communities—and distills how the fixed political structures of industrialized societies are an outlier in human history.
Borderlands
Why Do Swallows Fly to the Korean DMZ?
By T. Yejoo Kim
An anthropologist discovers diasporic flights—including her own—that begin at and return to the waters of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
Cultural Relativity
Creative Nonfiction
Standpoints
In Flux
Borderlands
By Uzma Falak
An anthropologist-poet listens to echoes of laughter and other sounds of crossings in Kashmir.
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