Smarty Pants

The English country house has been on the brink of ruination since at least the start of World War I—or perhaps the first chug of the Industrial Revolution—or was it the end of serfdom …? Propping up this dying, decadent institution has been a favored pastime of preservationists, architecture buffs, and earls for about as long as the institution has been around. In his new book, Noble Ambitions ,...

It’s Pollinator Week, and the bugs need us more than ever. Not just bees: butterflies, moths, wasps, flies, beetles, midges, hummingbirds … Around 90 percent of the world's flowering plants and 75 percent of our major food crops rely on pollinators, and they’re dying. Nowhere is insect decline more intimately entwined with our own than with honeybees, 2.7 million colonies of which are hauled aroun...

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 latest sci-fi...

Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground, the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two cofounders of the Weather Underground, a militant, radical leftist group of the 1970s that used tactics like the after-hours bombings of government buildings—including the Capitol, the State Department, and the Pentagon—to protest the Vietnam War and racial injustice. “When I was just 3 years old, I learned to r...

Summer cometh: the grills get scraped clean, the buns are split, and hungry Americans get set to boil or broil their wursts, wieners, and sausages. In the summer of 2021, Jamie Loftus drove from coast to coast, tasting the vast array of hot dogs that America has to offer, consuming as many as four a day—and in one notable (or regrettable) instance, five. Chicago-style and the Coney Island special;...

No place is better suited to those with a taste for champagne but a beer budget than the humble estate sale. Its various guises—be they church rummage sales, yard sales, or online auctions—offer a variety of ways to acquire quality pieces and a little bit of history, with the bonus of saving grandma’s treasures from the landfill. For several years, vintage enthusiast Kate Davis has been writing a...

“Medieval psychology” might sound nearly a millennium out of date, irrelevant to modern science, with its reassurances of cognitive data and peer-reviewed studies. But we often say that Shakespeare’s 400-year old plays communicate the human condition, and that wouldn’t be possible if the Bard didn’t have a deep understanding of what makes our minds tick. Rewind the clock just 200 years furthe...

Defining words is hard, no matter what they are, but the difficulty only doubles when the word in question is a purely visual referent like color. How do you define blue ? Or red, or green, or—God forbid—pink? Well, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has this to say about teal duck , sense two, which transcends its origin as waterfowl: “a dark greenish blue that is bluer and duller than...

Songbirds are disappearing at an alarming rate, with some species teetering on the verge of extinction, barely clinging to their endangered habitats. Birders, not to mention scientists, are sounding the alarm. But true as these words are today, they also describe the 19th century, and the valiant—and occasionally violent—efforts to protect birds from the utter devastation of human activity. This i...

In a cramped rent-controlled apartment on the lousy end of the Upper East Side, a dying woman in a diaper writes the story of her life. She is Barbara Rosenberg, high on OxyContin and determined to explain herself, if not exactly apologize, to the two people she loved most: her estranged trans son and her best friend, Sugar Becker, whose betrayals she has yet to forgive. This delirious monologue i...

Elizabeth Bathory is alleged to have been the most prolific serial killer of all time, responsible for butchering as many as 650 virgins and bathing in their blood. Her Hungarian water castles are the sites of gruesome ghost tours, a metal band named itself for her, and for years she was in the Guinness Book of World Records. The number of women she’s said to have killed is four times the populati...

Since 2011, the at-home DNA testing company 23andMe has invited its users to “celebrate your ancient DNA” with its Neanderthal report, which tells users whether their prehistoric genes predispose them to certain behaviors, like hoarding or not getting hangry. In the 1880s, Neanderthals were not being celebrated at all—they were depicted as little more than troglodytes with tools—and the 1980s were...

Audley Moore mentored Malcolm X, popularized reparations for African Americans in a 1963 essay, and advanced the cause of Black women in both the Black nationalist and civil rights movements. She rubbed elbows with the Mandelas, Jessie Jackson, and Rosa Parks. Once a household name in the mid-20th century, she has fallen out of the history books, despite a career of organizing and activi...

In ancient Greece, the view from on high was known as catascopos , or “the looker-down.” It's a privileged perspective, and in the modern world, one increasingly taken by machines: drones, satellites, spy cameras, airplanes, sentient doorbells. In his new book, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View , Edward McPherson surveys the cultural history of top-down and far-ranging persp...

Stories of the undead tormenting the living supposedly entered the English-speaking world in 1732, with a report from the Hapsburg military of events in Serbia—events that would go on to inspire the most famous vampire of all, Dracula. But the count from Transylvania was neither the first undead man in England (British corpses went walking in 680, and again in 1090) nor the most emblematic of the...

Foraging has been part of the human story forever, and its post-pandemic resurgence is a return to ways of living with the natural world that have only recently been forgotten. Gabrielle Cerberville, or the Chaotic Forager , as she’s known online, is one of the voices championing the practice on social media. Her videos distill the beauty of living with the seasons into bite-size videos, many of t...

Boxy Moskvitch and Lada cars, pastel-green concrete tiles, derelict playgrounds, intermittent hot water: these were the markers of Izidora Angel’s childhood in 1980s Sofia. “Banana-Yellow Trabants,” her essay for our Autumn 2025 issue, takes its name from the Duroplast car that her grandfather, and then her father, Solomon, drove in the 1980s. But bananas show up elsewhere, too: in the myths that...

From 1968 through the early 1980s, thousands of fires raged through the Bronx. The precise number is unknown and it’s uncertain who was responsible for setting them. But at the time, most fingers pointed to the working-class Black and Puerto Rican tenants who lived in the borough. The newspapers said as much, as did the Blaxploitation movies of the late 1970s. Politicians, too: in the words of Sen...

“Several years ago, the musician Mike Mattison fixated on the story of how Charlie Idaho killed the Mercy Man,” Eric McHenry writes in our Summer issue. Mattison had found the tale in the writings of folklorist Alan Lomax, whose source identified a powerful Mississippi levee boss as the murderer of an SPCA officer. Not finding any existing ballads about the crime, Mattison wrot...

For the past few decades, American democracy has crystallized around the central importance of voting: making an informed decision about a candidate or a referendum, and expressing it at the ballot box. The marketplace of ideas—enshrined in our constitutional right to free speech—will ensure that the best arguments, and thus the best candidates, win the election. If that idea sounds a little tired...

Language is always changing, but these days it seems to be moving at warp speed. Whether it's the shift from 😂 to 💀 or the rise of “brain rot,” internet slang is taking over, and if you want to keep up with what's cool (another slang word, from another century), you need to be online. But if you aren’t keen on spending hours scrolling through TikTok, etymology nerd Adam Aleksic is more than happ...

American men are having a hard time right now. They're behind in school, staying single, earning less, drinking more, and dying younger. They’re also taking out their anger on women online, in the home, and in mass shootings, and taking dubious advice from social media influencers pushing ice baths and raw meat diets. They'd be better off looking to the films of Michael Douglas, argues Jessa Crisp...

On June 5, 1975, on the seedy stage of CBGB on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a band named Talking Heads took the stage for the first time. Unlike the Ramones, for whom they were opening, they weren’t sporting black leather jackets or edgy haircuts. David Byrne and Chris Frantz had met at art school a few years before, and the bassist, Tina Weymouth, had only learned to play her instrument six...

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the third Sunday in June would henceforth be celebrated as Father's Day. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at strengthening paternal bonds, as well as a tacit rejection of the policies recommended by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had just left Johnson's administration in disgrace after his controversial report on Black family life and poverty was lea...

For centuries, polyglots and the linguistically curious have pointed out the similarities between certain languages of the Eurasian continent. Dante stirred controversy when he first posited that all the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian—derived from Latin. But by 1786, the British judge and philologist Sir William “Oriental” Jones was applauded when he famously...