Elon Musk’s X Factor
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Elon Musk loves the letter “X.” He named his first company X.com. He named one of his kids X. He renamed Twitter X. Kill the birds! But why? “X” is geeky.…
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On a Tropical Beach, Conservationists and Poachers Collide
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The film follows the perilous journey that sea turtles make to lay their eggs on their ancestral land on a beach in Kenya. The shoreline where a green sea turtle hatches…
Staging Nuclear Dread in “Oppenheimer” and “Doctor Atomic”
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The late Daniel Ellsberg, in his book “The Doomsday Machine,” drew attention to a curious conversation that took place between Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1942, on…
Christoph Niemann’s “Recipe for Disaster”
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story News cycles, by nature, tend to document crises as discrete events. Suffusive emergencies—like the climate crisis—are captured mostly in the accelerating pace and frequency of such coverage. The increasing regularity of…
Feeling the Sting of Time with PJ Harvey
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Since 1992, when she released “Dry,” her début album, PJ Harvey has made complex music that channels a primal, earthly energy. For me, her work has always conjured images of the…
Time-Travelling with My Father
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What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story “Waves Only Get Real When They Break,” by Colin Farish (piano), Jaron Lanier (guzheng), and Jhaffur Khan (flute). It started after my mother died. She was a concentration-camp survivor—a prodigy…
“Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story It’s unfortunate that fantasy has glutted the movies and tarnished the genre’s name with the commercial excesses of superhero stories and C.G.I. animation, because fantasy is a far more severe test…
Searching for a Fortress Built by People Who Escaped Slavery
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story On a rainy morning in March, George Dawes Green, a seventy-year-old novelist and the founder of the storytelling nonprofit the Moth, arrived at Millstone Landing, about twenty miles north of Savannah,…
Can You Save One Species by Annoying Another?
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The scientist Tim Shields, who, in his field work, had been finding an ever-increasing number of dead tortoises, says that he grew frustrated with merely “taking notes on the catastrophe.” A…
