A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent
Among the thousands of cases the Supreme Court has decided, only a handful of dissenting opinions stand out. There is Justice John Marshall Harlan’s solitary dissent...
Little Town on the Prairie
Liang Village sits on the edge of the North China Plain, about 650 miles south of Beijing. The area was settled by migrants who came in...
Poet of the Dispossessed
Keiron Pim’s absorbing biography of one of the twentieth century’s most powerful and disquieting writers begins with a description of Joseph Roth’s birthplace, a small town...
Doomed to Lucidity
Around ten years ago, the British writer Andrew Miller found himself in something of a crisis. Until then, his career had been a pretty gilded one....
Understanding Diabetes—and Paying for It
On April 9 of this year, The New York Times featured an obituary for Arthur D. Riggs, a scientist likely unknown to most readers. Riggs’s career...
Cosmic Oceans Squeezed into Atoms
Suppose you are traveling on a municipal bus in the sunbaked South Indian city of Chennai, and you know Tamil. At some point, overwhelmed by the...
Corrections of Taste
Near the end of Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries, there’s a sentence that made me stop for a moment in disbelief. Perhaps it was meant to. F.R....
Where Will We Live?
The climate crisis can be understood as an experiment in pace. By burning the remains of hundreds of millions of years of flora and fauna in...
Rome Was His Laboratory
No one in Rome would let Francesco Bianchini punch a hole through their ceiling. Bianchini wanted to measure the size of the solar system, which required...
