Thanks to “Ol’ Man River,” the Broadway show tune made famous by Paul Robeson, many of us grew up thinking of the Mississippi River not merely as a piece of geography but a giant personality. That ...

When Robert Macfarlane published his first book, “Mountains of the Mind,” in 2003, he was in his 20s and still chasing summits at high altitude — but even then, his writing showed that his obsession ...

Mr. Rodríguez-Garavito is a professor at the N.Y.U. School of Law. Mr. Macfarlane is a poet, an author and a professor of English at Cambridge University. High in the Ecuadorean Andes is a cloud ...