Our 60th Anniversary

Man’s Biggest Friend

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

November 21, 2019 issue

Octopus: The Footed Void

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

April 30, 2013

Intrepid Navigators

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

February 25, 2021 issue

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

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

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

Flaubert’s Planet

Do novelists, and their readers, bear some responsibility for the climate crisis?

July 21, 2022 issue

A Hotter Russia

The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that Russia will be a relative winner in climate change, but a new book argues that the country will find itself in trouble.

June 23, 2022 issue

Reasons for Concern

The IPCC’s latest report, with warnings for supply chains and food security, may be the most suspense-filled document in human history.

March 9, 2022

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 Lie of American Asylum

Three new books offer searing portraits of the people affected by family separations and the criminalization of asylum in the Trump era.

November 5, 2020 issue

Deportation Nation

The deportation system held sway over immigrant communities long before Trump became president, but under his direction it has become even more far-reaching, arbitrary, and cruel.

October 8, 2020 issue

Inside the Deportation Courts

There is no principle of innocent until proven guilty in immigration court.

October 10, 2019 issue

First Among Equals

“Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. In the foreground, white and red paint—conjuring threads escaping from the woman’s sewing cushion—appears as if dribbled on the canvas.”

February 7, 2019 issue

The Mysterious Women of Vermeer

Vermeer has a mind-boggling technique for transferring visual sensations from eye to canvas as if without the hand’s intervention. Color has somehow wafted down, as leaves might on water, and cohered automatically into threads and ringlets and cushions.

December 22, 2011 issue

Camera Work

“To read about Johannes Vermeer and to look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There’s an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself.”

May 31, 2001 issue

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

The Housing Vultures

The investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis are dictating the bailout of this one.

June 11, 2020 issue

America’s Eviction Epidemic

Across the country, millions of people are facing eviction as protections in place for the pandemic have lapsed.

September 16, 2020

How NYC Is Zoning Out the Human Scale

This is a New York story only for now. Upzonings and transfers of newly created air rights are occurring in cities around the country. When it comes to real estate, New York City may lead the way, but others follow in time.

December 30, 2019

Tenants Under Siege: Inside New York City’s Housing Crisis

New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency. The tide of homelessness is only the most visible symptom.

August 17, 2017 issue

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

Where Health Care Is a Human Right

How does the single-payer system work in Canada, and does it need reform?

November 19, 2020 issue

What Ails America

Although I did not understand this then, I had a severe infection in my liver. I was in a condition known as sepsis; death was close.

September 3, 2020

Health Care: The Best and the Rest

Ezekiel Emanuel’s new book makes a comparative study of eleven of the world’s health care systems. Who are the winners and losers?

October 22, 2020 issue

Cancer Under Capitalism

In ‘The Undying,’ Anne Boyer rejects the conventions of the cancer memoir in favor of a manifesto.

November 5, 2020 issue

On Breaking One’s Neck

A doctor’s near-death experience and what it reveals about the US medical care system

February 6, 2014 issue

Putting Profits Ahead of Patients

Health care in the US is enormously costly, often in ways that are baffling not only to patients but to doctors themselves.

July 13, 2017 issue

Why Is Medicine So Expensive?

The system of prescription drug pricing is a patchwork product of history, vulnerable to manipulation by the pharmaceutical industry.

February 21, 2019 issue

Right Diagnosis, Wrong Treatment

‘America’s Bitter Pill’ by Steven Brill

April 23, 2015 issue