By advocating for agriculture in the arid West, Major John Wesley Powell challenged the way America viewed its right to develop the continent.
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Posted inBooks, Fiction, History, Profiles & Interviews, Science & Nature, Story
Namwali Serpell on Doing the Responsible Thing — Writing an Irresponsible Novel
“I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”
Posted inNonfiction
How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance
In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Irvine Welsh on Brexit, Existential Panic, and His Latest ‘Trainspotting’ Sequel
“The books from ‘Trainspotting’ onwards have been about deindustrialization … the cruel existential panic that we feel, in the sense that we don’t really know what we’re here for anymore.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Sarah Moss on Brexit, Borders, Bog Bodies, and the ‘Foundation Myths of a Really Damaged Country’
Sarah Moss’s tale of Iron Age reenactors and parental abuse is her way of addressing Brexit. “Putting the skulls of the ancestors up in some attempt to hold back history never works.”
Posted inProfiles & Interviews, Story, Uncategorized
Drought In Post-Apartheid Cape Town: An Interview with Eve Fairbanks
United in a common struggle, the drought has leveled the racially divided city’s physical and social barriers in profound ways.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, Story
Dawn of Dianetics: L. Ron Hubbard, John W. Campbell, and the Origins of Scientology
Read an excerpt adapted from Alec Nevala-Lee’s book, Astounding.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Fiction, Story
A Mysterious Crack Appears: Past Trauma and Future Doom Meet in “Friday Black”
In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s fantastical short story collection, the strangest fantasy of all is that people try to act morally in a corrupt world.
Posted inBooks, History, Story
Nell Battle Lewis, Storyteller for Jim Crow
How an otherwise high-minded social reformer preserved and perpetuated her white supremacist worldview.
