North America

Linda Matchan, for the Pulitzer Center (Photos by Michele McDonald)

The tiny Inuit community of Igloolik sits 200 miles above the Arctic Circle in Nunavut, Canada's newest territory formed in 1999 as the result of a land claims settlement. Igloolik is home to only 2,000 people, many of whom still live in a traditional way, hunting seal and caribou and hand-stitching animal skin clothing. It is stark, tight-knit, and beautiful, but also very poor and deeply troubled, struggling to adjust to the transition from nomadic life just 50 years ago to a modern digital world.

Linda Matchan, for the Pulitzer Center (Photos by Michele McDonald)

I'm here, near the top of the world, to write about Artcirq, an Inuit circus in the high Arctic region of Canada. It's an unlikely story: It was started by Guillaume Saladin, a circus acrobat from Montreal who'd spent summers here as a boy and wanted to return to help the community. A lot of help was needed. Life is tough here in Igloolik: people are poor and young people – including friends of Guillaume's – were starting to take their own lives.

NUUK, Greenland—The posters are plastered on school walls and at bus stops across Greenland's capital city. The message, aimed at teenagers, is a direct plea to use a special hot line: "The call is free. No one is alone. Don't be alone with your dark thoughts. Call."

If you know anything about Greenland, you know that it is the world's largest island. You know that it is the least densely populated country on the planet. You might even know that Richie Cunningham spent two seasons of Happy Days stationed here with the Army.

Greenland: The arithmetic of self-rule from Christopher Booker & Jason George on Vimeo.

In High definition

Greenland:The arithmetic of self-rule HD from Christopher Booker & Jason George on Vimeo.

SISIMIUT, Greenland -- Professor Lenore Grenoble stared at the bowl of raw beluga meat and gulped.

"So this is mattak?" Grenoble asked, using the Greenlandic word for the Inuit delicacy.

Visit Slate to view related slideshow by David Rochkind

NOGALES, Mexico—Enrique Enriquez is a veteran of the battles fought along the border. As one of the local heads of the humanitarian immigration agency Grupos Beta, Enriquez has spent almost 15 years watching as the business of human smuggling morphed from a series of independent "mom and pop" shops into a big business.

Visit Slate to view related slideshow by David Rochkind

Visit Slate to view related slideshow by David Rochkind

ALTAR, Mexico—I hadn't yet taken 10 steps off the bus when I made eye contact with someone for the first time.

"Are you going north?" he hissed, walking quickly toward me. "Let's go. Let's go," he implored.

After leaving Altar, migrants face a variety of threats, like drug cartels, bandits, the environment and US Border Patrol. They often get lost or disoriented in the desert and depend on the Border Patrol, or Mexico's Grupo Beta, to find them and save them from dehydration or hypothermia. The ones who are picked up by the border patrol are usually deported or repatriated to Nogales, Sonora, where they will rest up and prepare for their next attempt at crossing.

David Rochkind / Pulitzer Center

Migrants flood into Altar, Sonora before making the dangerous journey across the Sonoran Desert and into the United States. They often pass through here after being deported from the US, as they try to get back home or to organize another crossing.