Smarty Pants

Opiates have gone by many names in their millennia-long entanglement with humans, in an ever-refined chain of pleasure: poppy tears, opium, heroin, morphine. With the advent of synthetic opiates like fentanyl, we’re seeing addiction and devastation on a scale unmatched in the 5,000-year history of the drug—but also a return to some of the same patterns and failed attempts at regulation that have h...

In the past 30 years, electronic dance music (or EDM) has gone from underground culture to a global phenomenon. Journalist Matthew Collin drew on the British rave scene for his earlier work—a book called Altered State. But in the 20 years since that book came out, and even in the time it took to write it, EDM and its culture have completely transformed. The tunes on the radio and the DJs who put o...

The Snow Maiden—not to be confused with the Snow Queen, Snow White, or Frosty the Snow Man—is a popular Slavic folktale about an elderly couple and a miraculous child born from snow. In addition to being a charming story about the passing of seasons, it references a number of folk rituals, from jumping over fires on the summer solstice to mock funerals marking the Yuletide. Philippa Rappoport, a l...

The modern American home is a wilderness: there are thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants that lurk in our floorboards, on our counters, and inside our kitchen cabinets—not to mention the microbes that flavor our food itself. The trouble with wilderness, however, is that humans always want to tame it. Cleaning, bleaching, sterilizing, and killing the organisms in our ho...

Opera has a bad rap: it's stuffy, long, convoluted, expensive, weird … and at the end of the day, who really understands sung Italian anyway? The barriers aren’t just financial: there are hundreds of years of musical history at work, along with dozens of arcane terms that defy pronunciation. But opera has been loved by ardent fans for centuries, and the experience of seeing it—once you know what t...

You've probably seen the photographs that Lynsey Addario has taken, even if you don't necessarily know her name. For more than 20 years, she’s covered life in conflict zones around the world, from Afghanistan under the Taliban and the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, to the genocide in Darfur and maternal death in the Philippines—too much suffering, in too many places, to name, or even ima...

When disaffected teens in East Berlin first heard the Sex Pistols on British military radio in 1977, they couldn’t have known that those radio waves would spark a revolution. In the DDR, or East Germany, everyday life was obsessively planned and oppressively boring. To be punk was to be an individual, someone who wasn’t having any of the state’s rules. That didn’t exactly endear punks to the Stasi...

You may have heard of them before: those pale creatures with suspiciously sharp canines that sleep in coffins during the day, hunt people at night, and occasionally transform into bats. Stories of bloodsucking monsters have haunted humanity for hundreds, even thousands of years—but the modern vampire was arguably born when Enlightenment rationality met Eastern European folklore. That’s Nick Groom’...

A. N. Devers is a writer and rare book dealer whose business, The Second Shelf, centers on all the women writers that time forgot. When she first entered the trade, she noticed that these writers were getting second shrift: sold for less money, not sold at all, and left out of the archives. Why were so many award-winning, well-reviewed books by women sliding out of print? Since rare book dealers a...

What’s spookier than the Tower of London, home to the ghosts of queens and the rest of Henry the VIII’s enemies? How about the half-dozen black ravens that inhabit it—without which, as legend has it, the Tower will crumble and the kingdom will fall? Since there haven’t been dead bodies littering the Tower Green for centuries, someone has to keep the ravens alive—and that person is the Ravenmaster,...

Not everyone believes in witches: in Siberia, after all, locals blame misdeeds on ghosts, and the Irish have fairies. But for those who do, witchcraft can be incredibly threatening—and an accusation of witchcraft can be a powerful tool to control people and entire societies. To get you into the Halloween spirit, we’re revisiting our interview with one of the world’s foremost experts on witchcraft,...

Jordy Rosenberg is a transgender writer and scholar who focuses on 18th-century literature and queer/trans theory. His first novel, Confessions of the Fox , smashes those two disciplines together by retelling the story of two notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers: Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess, both real people who lived and breathed the fetid London air. But in Rosenberg's imagining, Jac...

Someday soon, you might be finally able to count all the grains of sand on the beach, because there might be no beaches—and no sand—left. With the global population and its attendant consumption booming, we’re running out of sand in our quest to build larger cities and better smartphones. This essential resource, so easy to overlook, ranks just below air and water on a global scale of how much we...

How much do you know about Oklahoma City? Probably you know about the bombing, the Dust Bowl, and the Trail of Tears. Maybe, if you’re a basketball fan, you know about the drama of their basketball team, the Thunder. A feeble history, then, of a flyover city in the public imagination. Sam Anderson wants to change all that. As a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine , he was sent off to O.K....

Why does New York City smell? Is its smell distinguishable from that of other large cities? Does that smell tell us something about the world that our other senses cannot? Last year we spoke to historian Melanie Kiechle, who has devoted a considerable amount of brain- and nose-power to our long relationship with the scents around us. Her book, Smell Detectives , is an olfactory history of 19th-cen...

In case you missed it, last month Forbes published an op-ed that stoked so much public outrage that the editors felt compelled to delete it. Libraries, it argued, should be replaced by Amazon to save taxpayers money. Yet Panos Moudoukoutas’s piece was based on a common misconception: that libraries are only repositories of books, whereas in truth, they provide myriad other services—and generate an...

Forsyth County, Georgia, is infamous for being—for a remarkably long stretch of the 20th century—one of the only all-white counties in America. This week, we’re revisiting our interview with Patrick Phillips, whose book Blood at the Root is both a history of the county where he grew up and a personal reckoning with the “ghost story” that he heard for most of his childhood: the racial cleansing of...

Eighteen years ago, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell turned their 3,500-acre farm in West Sussex, England, into a massive outdoor laboratory. They decided to cede control of their land to nature and watched it slowly grow wild again. Now, at what they call Knepp Wildland, herds of fallow deer, Exmoor ponies, and longhorn cows do battle with scrubland and tree branches, while Tamworth pigs rustle...

In her summer cover story for the Scholar , “ In the Labyrinth of #MeToo ,” Sandra M. Gilbert looks at how far the newest feminist movement has come—and how far we have to go yet to achieve feminism’s goals. Her essay places the latest wave in the mythic feminist tradition, expresses her qualms about certain directions the movement has taken, and asks how we should regard the work of artists whose...

The most unusual brains are not the largest, nor the ones that can remember the most digits of the number pi. What fascinates Helen Thomson—a neuroscientist by training, a journalist by trade—are the brains that see auras, feel another’s pain, or play music around the clock. In her new book,  Unthinkable , she travels the globe to find out what life is like for these people who perceive a com...

In 1956, John Okada wrote the first Japanese-American novel, No-No Boy , a story about a Nisei draft-resister who returns home to Seattle after years in prison. It should have been a sensation: American literature had seen nothing like it before. But the book went of print, Okada never published again, and the writer died in obscurity in 1971. That would have been the end of the story, were it not...

In case you missed it, the grassy courts of Wimbledon are open once again for the annual championship—the oldest tennis tournament in the world. Seven-time Wimbledon champion Serena Williams is back in action, moving through the singles bracket and joining sister Venus in the doubles, and Roger Federer is looking for his ninth win. To commemorate the most famous fortnight in sports, we’re revisiti...

It’s hard to believe that one of the biggest and oldest creatures of the planet is also the most mysterious. But whales have been around for 50 million years, and in all that time, we still haven’t figured out how many species of whales have existed—let alone how many exist today. How did these creatures of the deep get to be so big, and how did they make it back into the sea after walking on...

For more than 100 years now, we’ve been blessed with National Parks, beginning with Yellowstone in 1872; Pinnacles, created in 2013, is the 59th and most recent National Park to join the list. Other kinds of natural national treasures exist, though—protected monuments and seashores and recreation areas, plus an abundance of state parks and lands. This week,...

So many tropical storms and hurricanes hit Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles that native residents talk about them as if they’re family members: “Who broke that window—Rita? Gustav? It wasn’t Katrina or Ike.” Rising sea levels and increasingly volatile storms bring other, no less harmful consequences, too: groundwater salinization, disappearing wetlands, decimated wildlife and fishing. The choice f...