The Imps of His Age

In a harrowing, witty novel by Miroslav Krleža, written in Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II, a mediocre lawyer succumbs to the impetus to speak against all reason. 

June 6, 2023

‘A Can of Gasoline Under Indian Law’

In their efforts to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act, a constellation of law firms and conservative organizations have put tribal sovereignty in jeopardy. 

June 7, 2023

How Microloans Betrayed Cambodians

Originally pitched as a way to lift the rural poor out of poverty, microfinance is driving many borrowers deeper into debt. 

May 30, 2023

White Bay

Life under the chemical megafactories of Ingeniero White, Argentina.

May 28, 2023

The Mindsnatchers

Misleading optical effects, half-waking dreams, sleep paralysis, tricks of memory, paranoid delusions, temporal lobe lesions, intoxication, fraud, and faddism are abundantly familiar to us, whereas the UFO thesis flouts the known laws of nature at every turn.

June 25, 1998 issue

A Close Encounter

So we arrive at Francis Crick’s directed panspermia hypothesis: a few billion years ago, a technically advanced extraterrestrial civilization sent a rocket carrying a diversity of bacteria to Earth. The rocket discharged its cargo into the primeval soup, where the tiny creatures were fruitful and multiplied.

December 3, 1981 issue

The Third Coming

“For those who cannot believe in the Second Coming, or the Messianic hopes of orthodox Judaism, there are the UFOs! If the earth is being visited by extraterrestrials, surely the aliens must be friendly or by now we would have learned otherwise.”

January 26, 1978 issue

Sharing the Universe

With the advent of radioastronomy, the scope of investigations of outer space has been enormously widened as the strange music of incredibly remote spheres keeps pouring into steerable dishes and saucers of all kinds and sizes.

February 1, 1963 issue

The Art of Pleasing

It was the charm Margot Fonteyn radiated, the lovability, that made her so cherished by audiences for more than four decades.

December 2, 2004 issue

Secrets of Nijinsky

Nijinsky’s famous diary was the record of his thoughts as he began to go insane. To my knowledge, it is the only sustained written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis.

January 14, 1999 issue

Star

When it came to hissing Lola Montez would develop the hide of a rhinoceros.

June 20, 1996 issue

Bad Housekeeping

Isadora Duncan’s vocabulary resounds with such period words as Woman, Beauty, Truth, Art, Glorious Vision. In spirit she was far more a pre-Raphaelite than a Marxist.

December 18, 1969 issue

Dancing Queen

“Ballet taught me to stay close to style and tone. Literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life.”

June 10, 2023

Facts That Won’t Go Away

“It was narrative I liked and wanted to write, especially of events that people hoped to disguise, conceal, or deny entirely.”

June 3, 2023

The New Organizers

“It’s a strange moment: there is simultaneously extreme wealth and skyrocketing real estate prices and rents but also austerity for anything in the public sphere (other than the police).”

May 27, 2023