Sonic Geographer

The composer whose music bears witness to a planet in peril

A Writer by Nature

An excerpt from World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

The Founder and the Epidemic

Dr. Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration of Independence, could not save Philadelphia from yellow fever

Responses to Our Spring 2020 Issue

Coronavirus World

Numbers, meaning, and truth

Feminism’s First Think Tank

The very different women of the Radcliffe Institute’s inaugural class

The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s Maggie Doherty

Farm to Fable

How a now-forgotten writer changed American agriculture

The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution by Stephen Heyman

cafe tables

The Bucket

Lenin

Revolutionary Chaos

The first-ever English translation of a 20th-century Russian masterpiece

Book

Why Book Reviewing Isn’t Going Anywhere

A researcher explores the future of a changing practice

The Wine of Life

How as a young soldier in the Trentino, I passed my evenings in a lovely bookshop in a town near camp

Flunking Description

Habitat Me

Looking for a Model

Big Thinker

The diplomat who argued for “containment”—and lived to regret it

George F. Kennan: An American Life By John Lewis Gaddis

The Gravity of Falling

Having hurtled through the American century, we are distracted and confused. But can we find our way again?

Memento Mori

A mother’s grief

Blue Nights By Joan Didion

Fields Apart

Physics, past and future

The Infinity PuzzleBy Frank Close /Physics on the Fringe By Margaret Wertheim

Virtual Vigilantes

A tale of crime online

Worm: The First Digital World War By Mark Bowden

Beauty and the Blue Bottle Fly

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