Edward Burtynsky’s photographs chronicle the gigantic scale of the scarred landscapes created by twentieth-century extractive industries.

In The Nerd Reich Gil Durán shows how Silicon Valley billionaires have pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called techno-fascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.

La Bola Negra sidesteps the vicious politics of the Spanish Civil War to tell a story about gay sexual freedom.

George Sand’s scandalous life, including a decade-long affair with Chopin, has obscured the influence of her many novels.

Bennie Thompson’s trailblazing career came after the success of the Voting Rights Act and could end with its fall.

Claire-Louise Bennett’s novels have found a new language to evoke the often circular, abstracted nature of human consciousness.

The Amur tiger and the jaguar are among the most elusive big cats in the world. Biologists have spent years tracking them down to save them.

The “Yemen Model” of American foreign policy has proved a catastrophic failure, leaving brutal proxies better armed and ordinary Yemenis less safe.

The US drive to win the AI race against China now feeds a fantasy of permanent American dominance in global affairs.

Why is it that so many smart, inquisitive writers, smitten by the elusiveness of Vermeer’s pictures, should work so hard to wrestle that elusiveness into submission?

This is the chatbots’ original sin: they are programmed to deceive us.

Since the time of Eugene V. Debs, socialists have struggled to persuade Americans that they could create a more just society.

Saul Leslie’s A Working Title I Want to Change, a satire about the British supermarket chain Tesco, joins a spate of recent novels about people trying to survive the gig economy.

Fifty years after the last Weather Underground bomb exploded, former members and their children reassess the costs of the group’s violent struggle.

Wallace Shawn’s plays expose the ways in which civilized society is maintained by a violence that is everywhere denied.

In his view camera pictures of New York in the late 1970s, Baldwin Lee reinvented the photographic tradition of the city as empty stage.

The painter Emily Mae Smith hands over her brush to a character borrowed from pop culture—a gesture with symbolic depth.