Bill Donahue is a writer living in Portland, Oregon.

Kateri Tekakwitha was a seventeenth-century Mohawk Indian and a Roman Catholic ascetic who slept on a bed of thorns. On December 19, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI credited her with causing a miracle. She will soon be named a saint. But what exactly does that mean? How does someone become a saint? And why is a con artist Italian friar who faked his stigmata wounds already a saint?
Edited by Laura Hohnhold.

In August, 1913, a pudgy middle-aged man named Joe Knowles stepped naked into the woods of Maine, to see if he could live as a primitive man. When he returned to his home in Boston two months later, clad in a bearskin,  200,000 people greeted him at North Station. Edited by Toby Lester.

Inside the arcane world of competitive stair racing. Edited by Dean Robinson.

A week with fortune seekers on the oil patch in Williston, North Dakota. Edited by Katie Eggers.

A look at Bandon By the Sea, Oregon–and a meditation on the basic joys of going to the beach. Edited by Nino Padova.

Fourteen years ago, Karl Bushby set out to hike 36,000 miles across four continents. He’s still trying to get home. Edited by Dennis Lewon.