Nicolas Pollock

Updated at 2:12 p.m. ET on April 16, 2021. For many young adults and their parents, the words box tops evoke fond memories of cutting out cardboard rectangles and stuffing them into Ziploc bags to carry to school. The Box Tops for Education program, founded in 1996, is a General Mills initiative that allows families to redeem labels from eligible food and household products for 10-cent contributions to their schools.

Having moved from the teeming cityscape of Taipei to the rural American South in the 1970s as a preteen, I know something of the shock, at once awe-inspiring and estranging, of that first sight of the great American landscape—just sheer land—that seems to stretch on forever. Watching Minari, the new semi-autobiographical film from Lee Isaac Chung about a Korean-American family newly arrived in the heartlands of 1980s Arkansas, I remember again that uncanny sense of feeling at once free and lost.

Around the world, coastal waters are steadily growing darker. This darkening—a change in the water’s color and clarity—has the potential to cause huge problems for oceans and their inhabitants. “It’s affecting the quality of the sea we know,” says Oliver Zielinski, who runs the Coastal Ocean Darkening project at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. These “changes in the physics will lead to biological changes,” he adds.