Smarty Pants

There’s a dark chapter in American history that gets left out of the history books: the American Plan, which detained tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of women from the 1910s through the 1950s. Conceived in WWI to protect soldiers from “promiscuous” women and the diseases they possibly carried, women were surveilled, picked off the street, detained without due process, imprisoned some...

Imagine there’s a place where music exists as it was first created, thousands and thousands of years ago, a place where song and dance still glued communities together across generations. That place exists: Epirus, a little pocket of northwestern Greece on the border with Albania. There, in scattered mountain villages, people still practice a musical tradition that predates Homer. In his...

Were you a geek? A nerd? Did you play Magic: The Gathering, paint Warhammer miniatures, learn to speak Klingon or Elvish, or memorize whole scenes from Star Trek? If so, then good news: it might have taken a few broken eyeglasses and shoves in high school, but geek culture has finally triumphed. Dragons are cool,  Star Wars  has never had more fans, and everyone is geeking out over the l...

Rachel May's new book,  An American Quilt , has an innocuous enough title, invoking an innocent American pastime. But sometimes ugly secrets can be hidden in the stitchwork—or even, as in the case of the quilt at the heart of May’s book, behind it. The paper-pieced quilt was stitched together from fabric basted onto hexagon-shaped paper templates. These scraps, which turned out to be letters...

When there's a gold rush on, the thing to do is  not  to dig. Instead, sell shovels to all the suckers who think they'll get rich digging for gold. This is one of the lessons that investigative reporter Corey Pein learned when he moved to San Francisco at the height of the Silicon Valley start-up boom. In his analogy, the gold rush is the tech boom, and the suckers are all the start-up w...

Bobbie Ann Mason's short story “Live-Hang,” from our Spring Issue, is the story of two friends who come from different worlds. Dave and Miguel meet in the gutting room of a chicken processing plant. Both are working class, but Dave and his wife, Trish, are white U.S. citizens, while Miguel and his wife, Maria, are undocumented Mexican immigrants. Even though their jobs diverge—Dave uses a con...

When we talk about climate change and conservation, animals tend to steal the show. Yet the organisms whose extinction would affect us the most are actually plants. Horticulturalist Carlos Magdalena has become known as the Plant Messiah for his work using groundbreaking, left-field techniques to save endangered species. First captivated by the bogs and flowers of his...

Some of our best poets have the greatest range: think of Shakespeare, in all his wild permutations, or Edna St. Vincent Millay boomeranging from heartbreak to revelry. Or T. S. Eliot, who captured our bruised souls in “The Waste Land,” itemized the neuroses of unrequited love in “Prufrock, and then turned around and set to verse the antics of cats like Growltiger and Rumpleteazer. You could say th...

Journalist Anna Badkhen has immersed herself in the lives of Afghan carpet weavers, Fulani cow herders in Mali, and other people often ignored or forgotten—especially in the Global North. Yet our lives are entwined with others’ across the continents, and in ways that we may not even realize. Consider, for example, the dire situation in Joal, Senegal—the subject o...

Since August 2017, in the country’s latest wave of Buddhist-on-Muslim violence, over 647,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar due to systemic violence and ethnic cleansing that has killed more than 10,000 people. Why is a religion seen as so peaceful in the West lashing out with such vehemence, and why are the Rohingya their target? And how did a seemingly local conflict erupt across the e...

We revisit an interview with Eugenia Cheng, the author of  How to Bake Pi,  who translates higher math using metaphors that even the most mathematically disinclined can comprehend: infinite layers of puff pastry, endless jars of marmalade, and deep-dish pi(e). She talks about the false dichotomy between mathematics and art, and how understanding ma...

There are a lot of very good, very long books out there:  Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote,  the Neopolitan Novels. And then there are the very long books you probably won't ever want to read, like Leonid Brezhnev's memoirs, Saddam Hussein's hackneyed romance novels, or the Kim family's film theory. This show is about  that  kind of very long book, and the man who decide...

Americans love a child prodigy: Shirley Temple, Bobby Fischer, Henry Cowell … the list goes on. There’s just something about kid geniuses that enchants us—fascination at how differently they must see the world, and envy at how they've got it made. But in her new book,  Off the Charts,  Ann Hulbert looks at a range of children who've made a splash over the past century, and whose liv...

For decades, artists have been using horror to speak to our deepest societal fears, from the wilderness (werewolves) to the unknown (aliens). With zombies, that fear is infection: the outbreak of some terrible epidemic that sweeps the world, rendering us all into the drooling, flesh-eating monster next door. But as Dahlia Schweitzer shows in her new book,  Going Viral , zombies are part of a...

Giorgio Vasari has been variously called the father of art history, the inventor of artistic biography, and the author of “the Bible of the Italian Renaissance”—a little book called The Lives of the Artists . It’s a touchstone for scholars looking to get a peek at life in Michelangelo’s day, and quite fun, too, depending on whose wildly embellished life you’re reading. Ingrid Rowland joins us on t...

If you're a creature of the 21st century, odds are you've stumbled upon the nascent DIY movement. From baking our bread to stitching our own clothes to raising back yard chickens and growing our own vegetables—even restoring our own furniture—the past few decades have seen a resurgence in our appreciation for crafts, right down to craft beer. But have you ever thatched your own roof with grasses t...

Phil Klay joins us on the podcast to talk about his essay, “Tales of War and Redemption,” in our Winter issue. It’s an essay that starts on a humorous note, describing the horrible, ridiculously gory deaths of the Christian saints in  The Big Book of Martyrs— a comic book for kids. And then he reminds you that he’s been in war, and he’s seen horrible deaths, and...

School choice. A portfolio of options. Charters. Vouchers. Virtual classrooms. This is the vocabulary of the 21st-century American education system—and having more of these private options is exactly what policymakers, like Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, would like to see. But where did the idea of "public charter schools" come from? And what kind of impact does siphoning money away from the...

So much of the story we hear about China today is an economic one—how over the past few decades, it has risen from poverty and ruin to become a global economic powerhouse. But there’s a story beneath the surface, of the artistic avant-garde that resisted rule from above and inspired generations of ordinary Chinese citizens to seek freedom of expression. From their countryside re-education posts to...

The Roman Empire's reputation precedes it: a wingspan that stretched from Syria to Spain, and from the Nile to Scotland's doorstep. Centuries of unbroken rule, a unified commonwealth, and at one point nearly a quarter of the world's population. And then, it all came tumbling down. Why Rome fell has been a favored subject of armchair theorizing pretty much since the empire started teetering—an...

This week, Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman talk about the science (and practice) of creating new things. We share a lot with the other sentient beings on this planet—love, hunger, death, joy, family, jealousy, rage. There's one thing, though, we do that other species, for whatever reason, do not: we innovate. We create. And we do so in a symbiotic way with other humans, building and improving on...

This week, we talk to Cullen Murphy, the son of cartoonist John Cullen Murphy, about growing up during the funnies’ midcentury heyday. Cartoon County is part memoir, part history of the giants of the comics world, who drew  Superman, Beetle Bailey, Hägar the Horrible, The Wizard of Id  … and a bevy of strips and gags read by millions of Americans. Visit the episode page  for a slide...

This week on the podcast, we’re talking about sublimated desires—and the repressed kind, too. William Deresiewicz expands on an essay he wrote for us about being a man in Jane Austen’s world—and how her novels are about so much more than Colin Firth-as-Mr. Darcy. And Hallie Lieberman explains how the history of sex toys—and the laws banning them—can illuminate America’s complicated relationship wi...

A measly three percent of books published in the United States are works in translation—so this week, we’re shining a spotlight on two books from dramatically different places. Naivo’s  Beyond the Rice Fields  is the first Malagasy novel ever translated into English; he and his translator, Allison Charette, talk with us about love stories and origin stories. And Tenzi...

Our Halloween special covers two subjects perfect for your next macabre dinner party: how the witch gained her powers, and the myriad alternatives to a casket. Caitlin Doughty, the Internet’s favorite mortician, tells us about her world travels in search of the holy grail of corpse interaction—along with a few other stories that illuminate our changing relationship with the afterlife. And Ronald H...