While searching for photographs that depict black young women and girls living free in the second and third generations born after slavery, Saidiya Hartman finds a disturbing image.
Books
A Once and Future Beef
Beef is a major culprit of the climate crisis, but if you want to consider beef’s future, then look to its past. The industry’s tactics have not changed as much as you might think.
American Green
How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America, and what is the ecological cost?
This Month In Books: ‘You Talk a Lot Don’t You?’
This month’s books newsletter is pretty chatty for a topic that’s supposedly the pastime of introverts!
A Woman In Love Is a Woman Alone
On the profound loneliness of female desire in Lisa Taddeo’s “Three Women.”
Putin’s Rasputin
Journalist Amos Barshad meets with “Putin whisperer” Aleksandr Dugin to try to understand how a shadowy advisor exerts influence.
Tom Petty’s Problematic Album Southern Accents
In 1985, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most beloved songwriters made a regrettable misstep with a narrow conception of Southern identity.
What Is Elizabeth Rush Reading? : Books on Antarctic Adventure, Ice, Motherhood
“I sometimes wonder if this continent of ice is begging for a different kind of story to be told about it.”
‘If an Animal Talks, I’m Sold’: An Interview with Ann and Jeff Vandermeer
Ann and Jeff Vandermeer discuss talking animals, the weird/fantasy divide, and the ‘rate of fey’ as an organizing principle in their new anthology of classic fantasy.
Why Bugs Deserve Our Respect
Fruit flies helped us win six Nobel prizes in medicine. Architects have been inspired by termite hills. Ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson explains why bugs are so essential to the world we live in.
