Archive

White Bay

Life under the chemical megafactories of Ingeniero White, Argentina.

May 28, 2023

The Lost Promise of Environmental Rights

Fifty years ago, working-class activists tried to make courts and legislatures affirm rights to clean air and water. Today that strategy is on the verge of a comeback.

March 15, 2023

No Smoke, No Fire

Despite the gas lobby’s best efforts, Americans are waking up to the health impacts of gas stoves. There’s no going back.

February 1, 2023

The Groaning Grid

The US can’t reach its net-zero targets unless electrical utilities transition to renewable energy, but the biggest power providers are dragging their feet.

September 30, 2022

The Most Influential Invention

A history of paper shares all the facts and technical processes, the quality of the rags, the size of the paper sheets, the color and texture of different surfaces and how they were achieved, but most importantly it gives us a sense of a collective human vocation for creating a world apart on the page.

August 13, 2015 issue

Disappearing Ink

“I left the New Museum’s ‘The Last Newspaper’—a show that sets out to explore the relation between newspapers and art at the end of the print era—with my fingers black from printer’s ink, just as they used to be years ago when I read the Times every morning on the subway.”

November 1, 2010

The Human Face of Type

“Serifs are not ornamental but functional: most of them are horizontal strokes that help to guide the eye rapidly and smoothly across the page. Sans-serif types, in contrast, present a thicket of vertical strokes that slow down the eye’s horizontal movement.”

August 4, 2011

The Great Comics War

Peter Maresca’s outsized and outlandish anthology Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, 1895–1915, shows just how sensational this newspaper art form was in its early years.

December 31, 2013

Stepping Out

The joy of dancing as a follower is to listen for the barely said—to interpret signs almost before they have been given, to read messages in the moment they are being sent.

August 20, 2020 issue

Souls in Single File

On Marius Petipa, the most productive and influential ballet choreographer of the late nineteenth century.

December 19, 2019 issue

Hail Balanchine

‘Serenade’ has no story or narrative. It is internal—inward, like the music, and more of a prayer or ritual than a theatrical spectacle.

December 21, 2017 issue

Scott’s Case

“Sufficiently dramatized, failure has its delights, as Fitzgerald demonstrated in those autobiographical pieces which so outraged his old friend, John Dos Passos, who wrote: ‘Christ, man, how do you find time in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff?’”

May 1, 1980 issue

Caesar’s Things

“With Zelda it is well-known that many faults lay in herself and in her stars, but new to discover a frantic will to overcome them, a strong talent and intelligence struggling to live—and most surprising of all, incredible energy and longing for discipline.”

September 24, 1970 issue

Fitzgerald Revisited

“One pleasure of rereading Fitzgerald’s stories now is to rediscover just how good some of them in fact are, and how brilliant a handful.” 

August 15, 1991 issue

Edmund Wilson’s Letters: To and About F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I feel called upon to give you this advice because I believe you might become a very popular trashy novelist without much difficulty.”

February 17, 1977 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

How to Understand the Dreyfus Affair

“The Dreyfus Affair demonstrates the fragility of reason, of the rights of man, and indeed of civilized values when a nation feels itself under threat from an external or internal enemy.”

June 10, 2010 issue

Holy Hysteria

“From January until October 1898 a convulsion of anti-Semitism ran through France; no major population center was spared, whether there were Jews living in it or not. There were demonstrations and riots, attacks on synagogues and shops; ‘patriots’ encouraged hotelkeepers to evict Jews from their rooms.”

April 10, 2003 issue

The Lesson of the Dreyfus Case

“Another book about the Dreyfus Affair? What could possibly justify loading another volume upon that already over-crowded shelf? The simplest answer is the timelessness of the story. It is a morality tale.”

February 27, 1986 issue

No End to the Affair

“French politics after 1900 were not the same as before. Perhaps even without the Affair, the new forces—socialists demanding reform, syndicalists calling for direct action, a new right-wing anti-democratic nationalism represented by the Action Française, a renewed movement among the Radicals for the final separation of the Roman Church from the French State—these would have begun to make themselves felt; but there seems little doubt that the Dreyfus experience accelerated these developments.”

May 18, 1967 issue

The Peril of Civil Breakdown

The US political situation radiates instability. How likely is extremist violence in the aftermath of the election?

November 7, 2024 issue

Getting Out the Fear Vote

As Trump improvises at his rallies, his grim imaginings of a mongrelized, crime-ridden country are transformed into unfalsifiable myths.

November 7, 2024 issue

The Problems with Polls

Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.

October 17, 2024 issue

Bring Back the Fight!

In recent weeks, Harris and Walz have replaced a dynamic movement with a meat-and-potatoes campaign. That needs to change.

October 3, 2024