‘The Base of the Labor Pyramid’

Long exploited and denied basic rights, Brazil’s domestic workers continue to organize against an entitled elite.

September 17, 2023

Black Swan Times

Three months into Ukraine’s counteroffensive, even the best predictions about the war’s outcome could still be thrown off course.

September 13, 2023

Paradise Lost

In spreading lies about the risks of vaccines, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long played on anxieties about purity and pollution.

September 7, 2023

Not All Men

The sitcom Jury Duty exploits the controversial tactics of the prank show to make us feel good about mankind.

September 5, 2023

Food Tips for Christmas

“Where the Weathermen blew up buildings and shot police officers, today’s radicals defy federal food laws, revel in unpasteurized milk, dine on fried grasshoppers, frog fallopian tubes, and Filipino balut.”

December 19, 2013 issue

Russia: You Are What You Eat

“Recipes range from the dreaded gefilte fish to a particularly fanciful borscht—dishes that coexist only in this book and, so far as I know, at Veselka Cafe in the East Village, for only in these places can a quintessentially Ashkenazi Jewish dish and a quintessentially Ukrainian one be united by their geographic origin rather than forced apart by their ethnic ones.”

November 21, 2013 issue

A Hungry Little Boy

“Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar).”

January 12, 2012 issue

Food

“I was brought up on English food. But not fish and chips, spotted dick, toad in the hole, Yorkshire pud, or other delicacies of British home cooking. These my mother scorned as somehow unhealthy…. So she did what every other cook in England in those days did: she boiled everything to death.”

February 25, 2010 issue

Garum Masala

Dramatic archaeological discoveries—including a marble Buddha in Egypt and jars of Mediterranean garum (fish sauce) and olive oil in India—have led scholars to radically reassess the size and importance of the trade between ancient Rome and India.

April 20, 2023 issue

Missionaries, Merlins, and Merchants

Recent scholarship illuminates how medieval Southeast Asia transformed Indian cultural and religious ideas brought to the region by monks and traders.

December 22, 2022 issue

Painting the Cosmic Ocean

“Mountain fortresses suddenly blossomed with artists, many of whom had been trained in the now-defunct Mughal ateliers, each family of painters competing with and inspiring one another in a manner comparable to the rival city-states of Renaissance Italy.”

June 6, 2019 issue

The Greatest Ancient Picture Gallery

One of the great wonders of India: the painted caves of Ajanta

October 23, 2014 issue

Our Silent Partners

Merlin Sheldrake explores how fungi challenge our understanding of nonhuman intelligence and complicate the boundaries between one organism and another.

October 7, 2021 issue

The Oldest Forest

The promise and pitfalls of commercializing kelp.

December 17, 2020 issue

Language of the Field

What hold do wildflowers have on the land, and on our hearts and tongues?

October 26, 2022

What the Trees Say

“If you look up at those mossy, fern-encrusted branches, you may well find redstarts and robins and wood warblers searching for insects, while woodpeckers and little owls build their nests in hollows in the trunk.”

December 8, 2016 issue

What Happened to the West Village?

The neighborhood became the epicenter of what the remorseless rise of rents will do to a once mixed and diverse city, rich foremost in its peoples and cultures.

October 9, 2019

The Death and Life of a Great American Building

As affordable rents disappear, the mental health of New Yorkers increasingly becomes yet another tale of two cities. Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city?

March 7, 2018

New York: The Prophet

“The war over the monstrous Lower Manhattan Expressway, a projected ten-lane elevated link…connecting the Holland Tunnel to the East River bridges, would be long and painful. Jacobs and the neighborhood coalition prevailed. But the nine-year struggle…convinced Jacobs that if she wanted to write other books she must leave New York.”

August 13, 2009 issue

My Lost City

“Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.”

November 6, 2003 issue

A Marx for All Seasons

“An Internet dominated by the profit motive is also an Internet that violates our privacy, amplifies right-wing propaganda, and intensifies various kinds of social inequalities.”

September 16, 2023

Le Boxeur

“For several years I trained five or six times a week, not counting the jogging sessions. I felt in control, disciplined, and very focused. I could face any difficulty.”

September 9, 2023

Guardian of Memory

“We cannot tell the story if we do not recognize how the past changes as we try to seize and fix it.”

September 2, 2023