Longreads

[Civilians in an air-raid shelter, Minorca, Spain], December 1938. © David Seymour/Magnum Photos   It's a strange photograph, something like a class portrait from a school under siege. In…

On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic. He fell in love with a…

By Charles C. Mann THE PROBLEM WITH environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they think conservation has something to do with biological reality. A researcher who specialized in cells…

Photograph: Bert Hardy/Hulton Archive/Getty Images One hundred and eight years ago today James Joyce and Nora Barnacle went out walking together for the first time. "Bloomsday", the day on which the…

Bouncing along a dusty Bavarian logging road, archaeologist Claus-Michael Hüssen keeps his eyes on the tree line to the left, searching for some familiar landmark in the thick forest. Suddenly…

Excerpt from Robert Hughes’ cultural history of Rome, where he reminisces about his first visit to the city in 1959:

“First, the color, which was not like the color of other cities I had been in. Not concrete color, not cold glass color, not the color of overburned brick or harshly pigmented paint. Rather, the worn organic colors of the ancient earth and stone of which the city is composed, the colors of limestone, the ruddy gray of tufa, the warm discoloration of once-white marble and the speckled, rich surface of the marble known as pavonazzo, dappled with white spots and inclusions like the fat in a slice of mortadella. For an eye used to the more commonplace, uniform surfaces of 20th-century building, all this looks wonderfully, seductively rich.”

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER I believed, as many have, that I had personally invented homosexuality. This was prior to the gay movement, when there was scant public evidence that being gay existed and, if…

Gargoyle atop Notre Dame; from Yvon s Paris , a collection of postcard views of Paris taken in the early twentieth century by the photographer known as Yvon. The book has been published by Norton,…

At a semi-secret meeting in the basement of a Greenwich Village church one Saturday night in February, a couple-dozen of the busiest Occupy Wall Street organizers sat in a circle of folding chairs.…