Smarty Pants

The most groundbreaking ideas in modern physics—the Earth is round, special relativity, the uncertainty principle—were once seen as shocking, impossible, even deviant (recall Galileo’s trial). Even today, wild ideas can be laughed out of a conference, especially if they come from someone perceived as an outsider. Brown University physics professor Stephon Alexander, one such self-identified outsid...

As of this summer’s Tokyo Games, skateboarding is an Olympic sport—and those of us who didn’t grow up popping ollies and skinning our knees might be wondering how that happened. Originally known as “sidewalk surfing,” skateboarding was invented in midcentury California and Hawaii by surfers looking for something to do when the waves weren’t great. Since the first commercial skateboard was sold in...

Black Beauty, Flicka, Secretariat, National Velvet, Misty of Chincoteague, and all the rest—horse books are a genre unto themselves, occupying an entire shelf (or more, should you add the 112 books in The Saddle Club series) of girls’ bedrooms everywhere. For all of the girls who lived and breathed horses (on the page or in the barn), the infatuation meant something that is difficult—or even embar...

If you were to distill the story of King Arthur and the Knights of Camelot down to its essence, you might alight on three nouns: Sword Stone Table . That’s the title of a new collection of Arthurian retellings, edited by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington, that imagines the legends of yore in a London coffee shop, a dystopian Mexico City, Anishinaabe country, and even on Mars. Krishna and Jenn No...

In her cover story for the magazine’s summer issue, Lucy Jones writes about “a renaissance of love for nature” that took place during the pandemic in the midst of so much isolation and death. Why is it, exactly, that going into nature is so therapeutic? Jones’s new book, Losing Eden , examines the wealth of scientific literature on the psychological effects of nature, from neurons to the whole ner...

The experimental archaeologist Dr. Patrick McGovern, known casually as the “Indiana Jones of Ancient Ales, Wines, and Extreme Beverages,” and Sam Calagione, master brewer and founder of Dogfish Head Brewery, have spent years resurrecting the beverages of the past. In 2017, we sat down with them before an event at the Smithsonian to discuss what it takes to turn millennia-old booze samples at the b...

Love it or hate it, sweat is the reason why you don’t die of heatstroke in the summer—though you might want to die of embarrassment if you work up too much of it. But perspiration also contains a trove of secrets about our body’s inner workings, from sexy pheromones and disease markers to what we had for lunch. In her new book, The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration , science journa...

For something that seems so simple, the act of adorning one’s face with a smudge of lip color or a flick of eyeliner can mean getting a promotion, getting home safely, and being taken seriously—or not. As journalist Rae Nudson writes in her new book, All Made Up: The Power and Pitfalls of Beauty Culture, from Cleopatra to Kim Kardashian , makeup has, for better or worse, shaped cultural narratives...

In her 25 years as a music journalist, Jessica Hopper has profiled the doyennes of modern rock and pop music: Björk, Kacey Musgraves, St. Vincent, Liz Phair, Robyn, and many more. Her reviews run the gamut from the latest Nicki Minaj album and the “mobile shopping mall that is the Vans Warped Tour” to the only album by D.C.’s first all-women punk band, released three decades after they broke up. T...

If you were a small child who grew up near a coastline—or maybe especially if you didn’t—nothing was more enchanting about summer than collecting seashells on the beach. People have been using conches and scallops and whelks as musical instruments, jewelry, canvas, and even money, pretty much since we evolved enough to pick them up. But the future of seashells and the creatures who make them is un...

There are a lot of very good, very long books out there:  Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote,  the Neapolitan 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...

Suzanne Simard, an ecologist at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Forests and Conservation Sciences, has dedicated her life to mapping the relationships between trees: how they send nutrients to one another, remember the past, warn their neighbors of disease or drought, and support their offspring. Her new memoir, Finding the Mother Tree , tells how her work has unfolded from her...

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...

Despite the rampant success of books like Marie Kondo’s  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,  intellectual circles tend to look down on anything that sells itself as self-help. And yet, in a certain light, the most original form of self-help might actually be philosophy—an older and more respected genre, even, than the novel. So this week, we’re going back to the past and asking that...

If when you read a work of fiction you are never alone, since you can hear the voice of the author, then when you read in translation, you're in sort of a threesome. The translator, as Cervantes is said to have said, is there at the edge of the frame, revealing the other side of the tapestry. Susan Bernofsky has been translating from German into English for decades, focusing on the writers Robert...

The first Gilded Age was a time of rampant corruption, the big business crooks of Tammany Hall, and lavish displays of wealth rivaled by abject poverty. It was also the period when America’s elite mastered the art of crafting the perfect cocktail. Though there were a few missteps along the way—including the Black Velvet, which included equal parts champagne and, disturbingly, porter—the era birthe...

Each week on our sister podcast, Read Me a Poem, Amanda Holmes reads suggestions from listeners around the world. Recently, a listener requested a longer work by the poet Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetry is not as widely known 40 years after her death as it should be. Holmes joins us this week to discuss why Rukeyser’s work speaks to her and then to read the long poem cycle “ Letter to the Front ,” w...

Geoffrey Chaucer was born a wine-merchant’s son in 1340s London. He survived the plague, the Hundred Years’ War, the Great Rising, and an adolescence spent wearing tight pants in a rich woman’s house to become one of the most celebrated poets in English. In the first biography of Chaucer in a generation, historian Marion Turner makes the case that the man we think of as a great English poet was, i...

On the eve of World War II, a young housewife named Alma Fielding found herself in the grip of a poltergeist hell-bent on flinging china through the air, toppling over dressers, and leaving no egg uncracked in her London home. Her case caught the attention of the Hungarian ghost hunter Nandor Fodor, whose tests at the International Institute for Psychical Research led to ever-odder phenomena from...

Did you notice when it suddenly became okay not to say goodbye at the end of a text message conversation? Have you responded to work emails solely using ?? Is ~ this ~ your favorite punctuation mark for conveying exactly just how much you just don’t care about something? Welcome, Internet Person—you’re using a different kind of English from the previous generation. But these conversational norms w...

Off the southern tip of South America, the remote and rocky Falkland Islands are home to one of the oddest birds of prey in the world: the striated caracara, which looks like a falcon but acts more like parrot. Charles Darwin had to fend these birds off the hats, compasses, and valuables of the Beagle ; the Falkland Islands government had a bounty on their “cheeky” beaks for much of the 20th centu...

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...

Stagger Lee is “The Baddest Man in Town,” as poet and critic Eric McHenry writes in our Spring 2021 issue. The man behind the myth—“Stack” Lee Shelton—was a real person, who did many if not most of the things ascribed to him in song (except, perhaps, go down to hell and take over for the devil). The bar, the hat, the gun, all have become mainstays of African-American folklore in the 120 years sinc...

Wild, blossoming cherries are native to many diverse lands, from the British Isles and Norway to Morocco and Tunisia. But they’re most associated with Japan, where the sakura is the national flower. These days, though, you’ll find blossoming cherries everywhere, on practically every continent. For that, we must thank a lot of dedicated botanists, who braved world wars and long sea voyages—and endu...

In the past year of the pandemic, Amazon has added more than 500,000 jobs, mostly in its various warehouses. During the same period, more than 20,000 of its frontline workers tested positive for Covid-19. Their boss, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, saw his net worth rise by $67 billion. Amazon’s shadow extends beyond the warehouses, though, to the cardboard factories that supply its packaging, the loca...