One young Ukrainian-American struggles to piece together a clear portrait of her parents’ difficult Soviet past, once they quit erasing, and began embracing, their legacy.
Search results
A Minor Figure
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.
The Caviar Con
When caviar-crazed Eastern Europeans flocked to Warsaw, Missouri to poach eggs from a vulnerable species of fish, federal agents went undercover and spent two years to build a case against them.
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Pearls
Born from irritation and intrusion, luminous and complex, surprisingly durable: pearls are rich with symbolism and saturated with pain.
One Dollar a Word? That’ll Be $28,000
Fresh off Watergate, Carl Bernstein next turned to expose the connection between the CIA and newspapers. For his efforts, he was paid $28,000. Inside one of publishing’s biggest boondoggles.
We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Very Beginning
Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do.
‘I Inherited Luck’: Bridgett M. Davis on Her Family’s Life in the Numbers
In a new memoir, novelist Bridgett M. Davis reveals that her mother was a Numbers operator in Detroit from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Talking to Big Baby
A child’s doll exerts a gravitational pull on every member of her family.
The Hunt for the Perfect Sugar
The quest for a zero-calorie sweetener is getting more urgent — and harder than ever. Will the science and economics of Big Food finally get us to the fake-sugar grail?
Searching for a Future Beyond Facebook
If we want to liberate ourselves from the tech monopolies, we have to figure out what to do with our data.
