“If the pandemic so terrified us that billions of us retreated into panicked cocoons for months, what can explain or justify our blindness and indifference towards the ten million lives ended each year by the repeated inhalation of smog?”
Pakistan has received global praise for the design and maintenance of a vast system that holds the information of 98% of the country’s population. For some, however, it is making normal life impossible.
All over the West, a housing crisis is causing workforce shortages, crippling local businesses, and threatening the culture and existence of mountain towns as we know them. But amid the doom and gloom, some people are fighting for solutions.
The American yam is not the food it says it is. How that came to be is a story of robbery, reinvention, and identity.
A Thanksgiving story about the limits of human empathy.
Ahmaud Arbery went out for a jog and was gunned down in the street. How running fails Black America.
Anita Hill is a professor and author. Her new book is Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence.
"I really do feel that my life now has purpose. And my responsibility really is to live out that purpose as much as possible. The reason that this isn’t entirely daunting is that I realize I am one individual. And that the issues will not depend on me entirely. … But I also realize that every person who has the opportunity should be involved, and that includes me."
A profile of the actor.
Finding the author of Pictures for Sad Children.
How the real estate boom left Black neighborhoods behind.
An essay on audiobooks.
For a decade, Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence had surfed the wave of populist-right politics like few other people in America. Then came Jan. 6.
The joys—and absurdities—of finding oneself abandoned in a desolate landscape.
Sunken by grief, Alenka Artnik found herself alone on a bridge, contemplating suicide. Ten years later, she is the world’s greatest female freediver and getting stronger with each record-breaking plunge. How one woman emerged from mental health struggles to push the limits of the human body.
Pregnant and facing decades in prison, the mother of Tupac Shakur fought for her life—and triumphed—in the trial of the Panther 21.
A profile.
In “the trial of the century,” a Houston socialite was accused of plotting her husband’s murder—and of having an affair with her nephew. But Candace Mossler was only getting started.
The story of the 1977 Revolt at Cincinnati, and the men who changed the course of the NRA forever.
An examination of Brazil’s immense tannery industry shows how hides from illegally deforested ranches can easily reach the global marketplace. In the United States, much of the demand for Brazilian leather comes from automakers.
A writer’s quest.
A hundred years ago, in the midst of an American food crisis, two spies who had once sworn to kill each other came together with a plan to feed America: hippo meat.
Ben Austen is a journalist and the author of High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Together they host the podcast Some of My Best Friends Are.
”We're not pretending to have all the answers, but we are attempting to say, ‘this is a real issue and it can't be covered up by simply ignoring it.’ And if you can see it for what it is and all of its full dimensions, you have a better shot at bringing people along to get the work done to fix it.”
A profile of philosopher Timothy Morton.
In the “smart nation,” robot dogs enforce social distancing and an app can claim to neutralize racism. The reality is very different.
How a touring dance company battles the Chinese Communist Party.
