Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court took a break from wrecking our rights to hear oral arguments in a case about a series of Andy Warhol silkscreen prints of | Continue reading
On October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton woke up gasping for breath, convinced that the walls of her suburban bedroom were caving in. The choking feeling | Continue reading
In the fall of 1959 the Museum of Modern Art erected three strange structures by Buckminster Fuller in its outdoor garden: a hundred-foot-long “octet | Continue reading
The United Nations has assessed that 276 million people worldwide today are “severely food insecure.” Forty million are in “emergency” conditions, one | Continue reading
In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, | Continue reading
In April 1940 Gershom Scholem wrote from Jerusalem to Theodor Adorno in New York about their mutual friend in Paris: "I am very worried about Walter Benjamin, from whom I have heard nothing, even in answer to my inquiries, since early December 1939.... If you know anything, pleas … | Continue reading
Salman Rushdie wrote the following in January after a public burning of copies of The Satanic Verses took place in Bradford, West Yorkshire, which has a | Continue reading
There is a particular undertow of unease that comes with working all day at a desk and then playing video games at night. They are simply too similar: the | Continue reading
“I have not felt so much at home for a long time,” wrote Mark Twain of arriving in Odessa in 1867. It was a curious sentiment. The jewel of New Russia—an | Continue reading
In April 1940 Gershom Scholem wrote from Jerusalem to Theodor Adorno in New York about their mutual friend in Paris: “I am very worried about Walter | Continue reading
In the June 9, 2022, issue of the magazine, Ethan Zuckerman reviews The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media by Kevin Driscoll. The book looks at the | Continue reading
“Yes, you can fly,” said one of the moderators. “We’ll be doing that in a minute.” There was scattered laughter in the theater of the Harvard Film | Continue reading
On the day before Christmas in 1935, the Austrian composer Alban Berg was pronounced dead in a Viennese hospital for indigents. The cause of death was | Continue reading
This, it would seem, must count as a historic volume, since it is the first serious, non-clandestine edition of the Marquis de Sade's writings ever to appear in America. | Continue reading
For about fifteen years, from the late 1990s through the early 2010s, my partner and I lived off the electrical grid in rural Colorado. Our two-room | Continue reading
On March 17, 1709, Antoine Galland, the French translator of The Thousand and One Nights, wrote in his diary of meeting in Paris a certain “Hanna,” “a | Continue reading
1. Since its creation in 1979, the annual Pritzker Architecture Prize—the highest tribute bestowed on living practitioners of the building art, likened to | Continue reading
The job of the regular daily, weekly, or even monthly critic resembles the work of the serious intermittent critic, who writes only when he is asked to or | Continue reading
According to Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas, the first public book burning in recorded history likely occurred in 430 BCE. Because the Sophist | Continue reading
The Ukrainian television series Servant of the People, which aired from 2015 until this year, is the story of Vasyl Holoborodko, a dedicated history | Continue reading
A few years ago I attended an open house at the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, southwest of Chicago. It was a lovely Saturday morning, and I was | Continue reading
E. O. Wilson corresponded for years with a notorious proponent of race science, advocating for his research behind the scenes. What does it tell us about his most controversial work? | Continue reading
We may detest flies, but our relationships with them are extraordinarily complex and often intimate. As well as vexing us, biting us, and making us sick, | Continue reading
The State Department is hosting a democracy summit this week. Representatives from around the world will assemble, virtually, “to set forth an affirmative | Continue reading
I am not in the athletic sense a keen swimmer, but I am a devoted one. On hot days in the Oxford summer my husband and I usually manage to slip into the | Continue reading
On April 3, 2016, journalism colleagues around the world and I broke the story of the Panama Papers, 11.5 million documents leaked from the files of | Continue reading
On April 29, 1934, Robert Frost wrote to his friend Louis Untermeyer that his “favorite poem long before I knew what it was going to mean to us was | Continue reading
That the history of our species came in stages was an idea that came in stages. Aristotle saw the formation of political entities as a tripartite process: | Continue reading
A few years after publishing his superb translation of Dante’s Purgatorio (2000), W.S. Merwin told me he was toying with the idea of also translating | Continue reading
Of books on Spain’s conquest of Mexico there is apparently no end. From William H. Prescott in the nineteenth century to Hugh Thomas in the late | Continue reading
According to the major monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—humans have a special nature and destiny, different from and superior to | Continue reading
The question "How many people can the Earth support?" is useful, though it is seriously incomplete. It focuses attention on the present and future | Continue reading
I’ve never met Macon Fry but I often meet his goats, Inky and Dinky. Every weekend—at least before Hurricane Ida shipped us on an all-expenses-unpaid | Continue reading
If you’re looking for faint gray linings to a very dark cloud, there is, I suppose, one slight benefit of humanity’s three-decade delay in dealing with | Continue reading
At a press conference in Tokyo in July 1966, a Japanese jazz critic asked John Coltrane what he would like to be in ten years. “I would like to be a | Continue reading
The Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is now best known for two works: the Gothic novel Uncle Silas and Carmilla, the first great tale of a female | Continue reading
He told friends his first novel had been accepted for publication when it hadn’t; he said he was “at home” in Vienna before he’d ever gone there; he | Continue reading
We live life with companions. Some, like parents, are present from our moment of birth; others are met at school or work and become friends or spouses. | Continue reading
In 2015 a cohort of well-known scientists and entrepreneurs including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak issued a public letter urging | Continue reading
What to Look For in Spring,...Summer,...Autumn, and...Winter are four small books published in the early 1960s by Ladybird, a legendary British children’s | Continue reading
A few years ago, I decided that I needed to know more about the history of science, so naturally I volunteered to teach the subject. In working up my | Continue reading
Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about beneath | Continue reading
Early in E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, attend a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. For Helen, the | Continue reading
That chronic Lyme exists in the realm of experience doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When medicine does not acknowledge the reality of the subjective—the thick reality of lived experience—we fall laughably short in our efforts to serve patients. When it comes to tick-borne Lyme diseas … | Continue reading
We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us. We allow worlds to be conjured up for us with very little concern for the implications. We overlook glaring incongruities. Learning to read with pens in our hands would bring huge … | Continue reading
At the end of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest (Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance), a woman named Ellen explains to the | Continue reading
Storm is the second-strangest book ever written about a storm. The strangest, which has never been published in its entirety, is a memoir by the | Continue reading
In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic took hold and people across the country started staying home from work and school, car traffic across the country | Continue reading