Myanmar’s Other Government

Popular resistance to the military junta that seized control in February’s coup has gone far beyond protest and strikes. A remarkable democratic endeavor in dual power is afoot.

June 7, 2021

‘Democracy Is at Stake’

The expert elections lawyer knocked down scores of pro-Trump lawsuits challenging the 2020 results. Now, he says, we’re in a struggle to save the republic.

June 1, 2021

‘Undine’ Retold

With its haunting indifference to logic, German director Christian Petzold’s version of the myth is a study of the ways in which men and women misunderstand one another.

May 30, 2021

Cummings’s Last Stand

The political adviser who helped Boris Johnson ride the Brexit wave into power has turned on him over the government’s pandemic record. But whose nemesis will it prove?

May 25, 2021

A Proclivity for the Unknown

“I was always attracted by the cosmos—the night sky and the deep, dark mysteries it held have always seduced me.”

June 5, 2021

On a Quest to Know Everything

“We’re living through a moment when the inhuman scale and complexity of the world has been made visible to us, and we are reacting in human ways. Paranoia is understandable, even logical.”

June 12, 2021

The True Cost of Living

“Gross inequity begets precarity and suffering, which begets fear, shame, and frustration.”

May 29, 2021

In Maine

There is about Maine a fascinating softness that seems to spread like a blanket over the hardness of rock and woods and icy turf. Not a tropical softness, but the odd snowy lassitude of isolation.

October 7, 1971 issue

The Vigilantes of Vermont

In 1777 Vermonters declared themselves citizens of an independent republic and ratified one of the most liberal, egalitarian constitutions in American history. How did a populist movement led by a violent, charismatic figure give birth to a stable democratic society?

April 5, 2012 issue

Naples, Florida

a poem

November 5, 2020 issue

Ah, Wilderness!

Americans’ captivation with wilderness springs from a deep source of anxiety and hope; an abiding belief in valuable myths of independence and personal enterprise that appear to survive in the frontier.

March 23, 1978 issue

Chicago Underground

While Chicago has long been known as the “City of the Big Shoulders,” what has mattered from the outset is that it has had a brain on those shoulders: a technological and commercial mind and a reforming, even a socially creative, intellect.

October 21, 1993 issue

The Real Texas

People go to Texas seeking fortunes, hoping to find a place somewhere between what is real and what is myth; it is strange and disturbing that this hope resembles the feeling that brought Anglo settlers, along with the people they enslaved, into the region so long ago.

October 24, 2019 issue

The Golden Land

The overland crossing to California has long had the aspect of a quest, and residents have dwelled upon the place and its meaning since the first remote settlement: What did that voyage ultimately mean?

October 21, 1993 issue

‘Paradise of the Pacific’

Nineteenth-century Hawai‘i attracted traders, fortune-seeking entrepreneurs, and capitalists, who encountered, and displaced, a flourishing and elaborate culture whose ancestors had sailed from Polynesia in 1000 AD.

December 3, 2015 issue

Buzz Buzz Buzz

Humans have spent decades trying to teach other animals our languages, but we’ve made little effort to learn theirs.

August 20, 2020 issue

He Tried to Be a Badger

The more that’s learned about cognition in other species, the tougher it is to make the case that our intelligence is anything special.

June 23, 2016 issue

Tigers, Humans, and Snails

Whether birdsong at dawn or just a weed in a sidewalk, nature is all around us. Yet all too frequently we only appreciate it when it’s out of reach.

February 10, 2011 issue

The Mental Life of Plants and Worms

Do jellyfish have minds?

April 24, 2014 issue