Wrinkles in the Map

In 2010, after military tours at sea and in Iraq as a Marine and sniper, Alexander Lemons returned home to Utah and tried to integrate back into mainstream American society. But he found himself feeling profoundly isolated, and this feeling was intensified by family tragedy and a mysterious chronic illness from his years in combat. When the weight of his burdens felt too heavy, he sought solace in perhaps an unusual place: environmental restoration, nursing back to health ecosystems that had been degraded or chemically polluted. In this episode, our Spring 2026 undergraduate intern Riley Petersen interviews Alex about the seen and unseen tolls of war–and how recovery is both an inside and outside job.WarbodyHigh Country News Article

In this episode, award-winning writer and historian Dr. Megan Kate Nelson joins us to talk about why certain stories and icons depicting outdated ideas of the American frontier are so persistent in popular culture today despite having been widely critiqued within academia; what kinds of stories might replace such depictions; and why we should care about more honestly accounting for the diverse cast of historical figures whose interwoven lives profoundly shaped the nineteenth-century West.

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation, is at once able bring alive the distinctiveness of Blackfeet identity, culture, and what it means to belong to the land, while simultaneously evoking deeper truths at the heart of the human condition. Our conversation covers this dance between the particular and the universal, how language brings landscape into being, storytelling as an aesthetic object, the relationship between oral Blackfeet tradition and written narratives, and the role of art in transcending the self.

In this short introductory episode, host Daniel Grant explains why we titled the podcast Wrinkles in the Map, and what you can expect to hear in future episodes.