Headlines

How Tree Rings Challenged the Myth of American Wilderness

By studying fire scars in ancient wood, many scientists have become convinced that Indigenous people transformed North America long before European colonizers arrived. M.R. O’Connor spends time with dendrochronologists, who study tree rings, and other experts to understand what

The secrets of Hohle Fels cave

Why aren’t we all Neanderthals? These ancient bird figurines suggest that art was essential to our evolutionary success - by Aeon Video Watch on Aeon

The ladder of knowledge

What we claim as ‘true’ is not a ceiling we are forever failing to reach but something that changes as we climb toward it - by Alexander V Gheorghiu Read on Aeon

Seeing Like John Berger

Megan O’Grady reviews a new Berger biography, Deana Lawson appropriates surveillance photographs, and Paddy Johnson answers the question: Do I need an agent?

Beyond the Glass

Among a collection’s many skulls, a grieving son learns how to live in a world that keeps going.

Addressing fear

Don’t bring a spreadsheet to a fear fight. Change causes fear. And change is all around us. The fear of the unknown. The fear of failure. The fear of uncertainty. Mostly, we’d like safety. And when the world changes, safety feels like it’s in short supply. One reason we have

How Not to Waste Your Life

“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the

The Muffled Thud of Fire in the Hole

From a 2014 article on The Dark Power of Fraternities by Caitlin Flanagan, this is one hell of an opening paragraph: One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West

Why Pageant Is Suddenly All the Rage

In a world skewed toward artifice, the East Williamsburg performance space’s commitment to confronting, rather than escaping, one’s conditions in art feels like a renaissance.

May Peace Prevail on Earth

Here are some photos I’ve taken during my time in Tokyo so far. I’ve been posting new stuff more or less daily to Instagram . Somehow I’m already about halfway through my stay. Somehow these images both capture and don’t even come close to capturing my experience

Whoa, the Lion Nebula!

NASA’s JWST recently snapped this image of the Lion Nebula (NGC 2392) . Massive stars undergo supernova explosions at the end of their lives, but these kinds of events are few and far in between. Most of the universe’s stars have lower masses, like the one belonging to NGC

John Berger in His Own Bruised Time

The late novelist and art critic asked Tom Overton to wait to write his biography until after his death. The result is deeply informative, deferential, and perceptive, sometimes lyrically so.