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.
interviews
Posted inBooks, Crime, History, investigations, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
A Manson Murder Investigation 20 Years In the Making: ‘There Are Still Secrets’
‘Everything that Manson did with his women was exactly what the CIA was trying to do with people without their knowledge, in the exact same time, at the exact same place.’
Posted inNonfiction
‘TV Has This Really Fraught Relationship with the Audience.’
Emily Nussbaum talks about why TV’s relationship with its audience has become more intimate, whether we can blame Trump on True Detective, and how a TV critic’s biggest challenge is just figuring out what to watch.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Science & Nature, Story, Technology
‘Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way the Gorgon Stare Did.’
The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology that can track multiple moving targets at once, is coming to a city near you.
Posted inNonfiction
‘The Underland Is a Deeply Human Realm’: Getting Down with Robert Macfarlane
“I thought the underland would be — of all the landscape forms that have drawn me to explore them — the most uninhabited. This proved wildly incorrect.”
Posted inNonfiction
‘Brokenness and Holiness Really Go Together’: Darcey Steinke on Menopause
Darcey Steinke says that most menopause memoirs “end with this come-to-Jesus moment of, ‘Then I accepted hormones.’ I’m not against it, but … I wanted to hear what it’s like for other women.”
Posted inNonfiction
‘They Happen To Be Our Neighbors Across the Span of a Century, But They’re Our Neighbors.’
One hundred summers ago, black Chicagoans were terrorized by whites during the Red Summer. Poet Eve Ewing talks about reaching out to her neighbors across time in “1919.”
Posted inNonfiction
‘If Any of My Old Friends Are Reading This, It Is Okay Out Here.’
Amber Scorah talks about committing the one unforgiveable sin: believing, then not believing.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Reimagining Harper Lee’s Lost True Crime Novel: An Interview with Casey Cep
“Somewhere along the way it became very clear to me that I was writing the book she never would.”
Posted inStory
‘The Home Is a Place as Wild as Any in the World.’
Chia-Chia Lin talks about the wildness of domestic spaces and writing her novel “The Unpassing” through the early months of motherhood.