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February 19, 2019
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Toby Lester

Toby Lester is a contributing editor of The Atlantic and Boston and the author of Da Vinci's Ghost and The Fourth Part of the World.

Soaring Ambitions

Early hot-air balloonists ascended to previously unimaginable heights, stirring humanity’s sense of perspective and possibility

by Toby Lester | Thursday, September 05, 2013

Armchair Travelers

The Renaissance writers and humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio turned to geography to understand the works of antiquity

by Toby Lester | Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Newsletter

THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

School Survival

by Anne P. Beatty

As L.A. teachers prepare to go on strike, we’re revisiting an essay by Anne P. Beatty about her time teaching high school in South Central Los Angeles, where her homeroom class often paused for a moment of silence to mourn students who had died in drive-by shootings. Her students knew that this was not the case in wealthier school districts. “They knew that somewhere there were schools with computers that worked, just as they knew that somewhere it was safe to walk through the streets at night,” Beatty writes. “They knew it wasn’t normal for 16-year-olds to die.” But what she found shocking, her students had to learn to endure. “Apathy was involved in giving in to the violence, and there was despair over the prospect of a better future.”