Best of SAPIENS 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
Home-Carrying—A Repatriation Trip to Vanuatu 100 Years in the Making
By Jenny L. Davis
An anthropologist and poet reflects on a journey of return that tells a larger story about human connection, acts of Indigenous solidarity, and the potential for repair within anthropology.
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
When Wartime Plunder Comes to Campus
By Petra M. Creamer
An archaeologist considers whether students should learn from antiquities looted from Iraq.
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
To Raise Children, We Must First Raise Parents
By Gül Deniz Salalı
An anthropologist compares her early motherhood in London with child care experiences in a hunter-gatherer community of Central Africa.
Creative Nonfiction
The Day I Heard My Mother’s Accent
By Diane Duclos
In a personal essay, an anthropologist reflects on her family’s dual Syrian and French heritage.
Standpoints
In Human Origins Research, Communities Are the Missing Link
By Jessica Thompson
A paleoanthropologist reflects on relationships between researchers and communities living around sites relevant to human evolution.
In Flux
Following the Life of an Abandoned Bull in Nepal
By Xena White
A visual anthropologist explores how divine cattle collide with urban realities in Kathmandu, revealing contradictions between ancient values and contemporary lifeways.
Borderlands
By Uzma Falak
An anthropologist-poet listens to echoes of laughter and other sounds of crossings in Kashmir.
