On Falconry

Q&A

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reveals life-long love affair with birds of prey

Hunts from the sky, partners with predators

Atavistic hobby fuels Dem. Presidential run

Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the first environmental activist with a legitimate shot at winning a major-party nomination for President. He has made preserving and cleaning up the environment his life’s work, rescuing the Hudson River from polluters and turning it into the centerpiece of the country’s healthiest watershed and winning billions of dollars in fines from corporate polluters in hundreds of lawsuits that have served as a powerful counterweight to avarice and greed. Kennedy’s emergence this summer as a dark-horse challenger to Biden only surprised people who make a habit of not paying attention. To them, Kennedy was a marginal weirdo and probably a nut, an aging Prince Hal who had disqualified himself from serious politics by tilting at too many windmills to count. Most recently, Kennedy had made a name for himself as an “anti-vaxxer,” a designation that signifies a worrying inclination to question large pharmaceutical companies about the safety of their products. The meteoric rise …

Q&A

Chester Watson

ex-Atlanta Rapper Denies that Fish Climb Trees

Struggles to Remember Dreams

He Finds Peace in the Countryside

By Armin Rosen

Hip-hop was born in urban parks and apartment projects, but there’s also a pastoral tradition in rap that long predates Kanye West’s flight to Wyoming. Earl Sweatshirt’s mother shipped him off to reform school on a remote Pacific island at a pivotal early point in the Odd Future boy genius’s career. Upon his return, Earl became one of the most influential lyricists in rap history. One of his young fans was a teenage skater and ballet dancer named Chester Watson, who’s now a lanky 26-year-old responsible for a decade’s-worth of his own brain-shifting hip-hop. The title of Watson’s latest album, Fish Don’t Climb Trees, combines two images from the rural town an hour and half outside of Atlanta where the underground rap star spends much of his time these days. The record’s name refers to “being underestimated or counted out,” he told me, with tantalizingly little elaboration. Maybe fish can climb trees in some other dream-universe that we can theoretically access, or maybe the limits …

On Falconry

Chester Watson

A Safe Harbor