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The World Trade Center: Before, During, & After

“‘Is that two buildings with fifty-five stories each?’ Nelson asked the architect. ‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘One-hundred-ten stories apiece!’ ‘My God!’ the governor exclaimed. ‘These towers will make David’s building look like an out-house!’”

March 28, 2002 issue

72 Migrantes

Sacrificing Their Lives to Work

In commemoration of the seventy-two migrants massacred on August 24, 2010.

September 5, 2011

Fintan O’Toole

The End of the Troubles?

“The question on which the future of Northern Ireland depends is whether, without the reward of power, an undefeated paramilitary army can be persuaded to trade the epic certainties of violence for the unglamorous ambiguities of peaceful politics.”

February 19, 1998 issue

Murray Kempton

The Great Lobbyist

“Lyndon Johnson’s art as a seducer consisted wholly of isolating the piece of moonshine dearest to his object, then appropriating it and handing it back as though it were a gift.”

February 17, 1983 issue

Jack Flam

The Enigma of Georges Seurat

“He was so intensely secretive that until just a few days before his death even his family and closest friends did not know that he had set up a household with one of his models and that they had a year-old son.”

November 7, 1991 issue

Raymond Carr

A Seemingly Ordinary Man

“Franco himself emerges as a colorless figure, a bourgeois family man, with no private vices and no civic virtues beyond a military sense of duty and honor, addicted like his subjects to TV and football, his mind inhabited by the ghosts of the past and snatches of stale Falangist rhetoric.”

November 17, 1994 issue

Milan Kundera

The Tragedy of Central Europe

“Boxed in by the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other, the nations of Central Europe have used up their strength in the struggle to survive and to preserve their languages.”

April 26, 1984 issue

Lorrie Moore

Artship

“She is (to speak historically, and to speak even, say, in a Russian or French or Irish saloon, loudly and unarmed) one of the world’s greatest short-story writers. As the writer Ethan Canin once said, ‘The stories of Alice Munro make everyone else’s look like the work of babies.’”

January 17, 2002 issue

Classics from the Archive

Oliver Sacks

The Bull on the Mountain

June 28, 1984 issue

Zadie Smith

Speaking in Tongues

February 26, 2009 issue

J.M. Coetzee

The Marvels of Walter Benjamin

January 11, 2001 issue

Hilary Mantel

The Perils of Antoinette

January 11, 2007 issue

Joan Didion

Insider Baseball

October 27, 1988 issue

Alma Guillermoprieto

Fidel in the Evening

October 22, 1998 issue

A Bestiary

An elephant and mahout doing relief work after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Banda Aceh, Indonesia, January 2005

Tim Flannery

Man’s Biggest Friend

The origins of the elephant–human relationship date back into prehistory.

November 21, 2019 issue

Wonderpus octopus, Lembeh Strait, Indonesia

Caspar Henderson

Octopus: The Footed Void

The closer you look at an octopus, the more you see.

April 30, 2013

Robert O. Paxton

Intrepid Navigators

Migration’s demands on birds are as daunting mentally as they are physically.

February 25, 2021 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Requiem for a Heavyweight

In Fathoms, Rebecca Giggs tries to comprehend the fact that whales now literally embody their increasingly polluted world.

August 19, 2021 issue

Desmond Morris

CATS

To enjoy the company of a cat, we must be prepared to forgo our dominant pack leader role, and adopt a more modest position.

November 3, 1994 issue

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Horse Sense

A book for naturalists or cowboys, bluegrass aristocrats or race-track touts, distinguished academics or little girls gone horse-crazy, and all readers with an interest in Equus caballus.

May 15, 1997 issue

Native Histories

Larry McMurtry

Chopping Down the Sacred Tree

April 22, 1999 issue

David Treuer

The Power Brokers

December 3, 2020 issue

Thomas Powers

The World from the Other Side

April 3, 2014 issue

Thomas Powers

The Indians’ Own Story

April 7, 2005 issue

Gordon S. Wood

Apologies to the Iroquois

April 6, 2006 issue

William H. McNeill

New World Symphony

December 1, 2005 issue

On Strike!

Willa Glickman

‘A Wakeup Call from Hell’

By striking for safe staffing levels, New York City nurses joined a wave of labor unrest that has swept the health care industry in response to Covid-19.

March 1, 2023

Hannah Appel

Tenant, Debtor, Worker, Student

In their historic strike, academic workers at the University of California took on one of the biggest employers, landlords, and financial actors in the state.

February 8, 2023

Alice Driver

Working in Their Sleep

Meatpacking workers in Arkansas, grieving loved ones lost to Covid and struggling to pay medical bills, are organizing for justice from their employer.

December 23, 2022

Andrea Sempértegui

Ecuador’s Historic Strike

With this summer’s strike, the country’s powerful Indigenous movement united two agendas long in tension: resistance to austerity and opposition to natural resource extraction.

October 5, 2022

The Art of Ceramics

Christopher Benfey

Resistance Pottery

Two recent exhibitions of the work of Black potters find political acts in the placid history of nineteenth-century American stoneware.

May 11, 2023 issue

Adam Thirlwell

House of Delft

In a recreated eighteenth-century home in London’s East End, the ceramicist Simon Pettet and his partner Dennis Severs created a world both elegant and deliriously contemporary.

May 25, 2023

Andrew Raftery

Clay Genius

A master of the punishing mercy of the kiln, Josiah Wedgwood set his stamp on European decorative arts and changed ceramics forever with the clay and glazes he invented or perfected.

November 24, 2022 issue

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