Holy cow, but we have another great issue of The Magazine ! Came out this week. First of all, fall in love with the illustration about by Olivia Warnecke for an article about a beloved naturalist, Derham Giuliani. Read my editor's note below for more details on what's inside. Subscriptions are $2 a month (two issues with five articles each) or $20 a year (130 articles! Incredibly good deal!).

Editor's Note for Issue #25

The desert attracts people, whether it's high and cold, low and hot, or any of the many other kinds in-between. Two of our writers were lured in and came out bearing stories of the life that flourishes within.

One night, Colleen Hubbard dreamed there was a cold desert in Eastern Europe. When she woke up, her pillow was missing. Wrong joke. When she woke up, she searched online and found the Polish Sahara, a fluke of history and glacial deposits. She had to see it, and she brought back "Just Desert."

Tim Heffernan recalls a remarkable naturalist — a man seen as secularly holy by those who knew him — who mapped insect life in the high desert in southern California. Tim attended Deep Springs College, a wholly remarkable two-year, men-only institute of higher education with a working farm and ranch and utopian roots founded north of Death Valley over a century ago. He met Derham Giuliani while there, as he describes in "Down from the Mountaintop," and carried one of Giuliani's treasures and some true gifts forward in life.

Owning chickens is all the rage in the cities, but what do you do with the poor cluckers when they're past egg-laying days? Nancy Gohring finds a cultural mismatch between the sentimental city dwellers who acquire fluffy chicks and the cold-hearted reality of senescent chickens, as owners find their birds are "Laid Out."

What does the term "disabled" mean? Can it have any sense outside of the structure of homes, buildings, and cities designed for those who are allegedly "fully abled"? Tim Maly encounters a unique designer, who has taken ramps as her specialty and is "Inclined to Help" in teasing out an answer and a strategy.

"My metal detector is working all of the time," They Might Be Giants sing. As is Mary Catherine O'Connor's in "Magnetic Fields." She wondered what makes detectorists — who include the Rolling Stones' bassist, Bill Wyman — ply their hobby. She uncovered a community that is priceless.

Our cover artwork is by Olivia Warnecke, a San Francisco illustrator and visual experience designer, who created the illustration for the article on Derham Giuliani. The moths and butterflies are drawn in part from those named for the naturalist.