Reflections on forty-three September Firsts spent with a W. H. Auden masterpiece

Crow mobbing. Raven conversations. Blue Jay talk. What corvid social behavior teaches us humans about community, safety, and belonging.

“We have built a world that privileges stimulation over presence and convenience over mutuality. There is an American dimension to this worth naming: a culture organized around individual achievement,...

Me. My mother. Her cigarettes

HOBOKEN, JULY 13, 2026. I shouldn’t write a eulogy for something that’s not dead. But I fear for the future of Scientific American --and science journalism as a whole. Attention must be paid. On Ju...

Beth Macy's Paper Girl on rural America, the decline of local journalism, and how to save our democracy before it's too late.

That's not funny.

Reclaiming what made me from the adoption narrative

Reclaiming what made me from the adoption narrative

A hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four …

You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart You, in the park, feeding the pigeons You cheering for the bees You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats You protecting the river You ar...

Our critic A.O. Scott takes apart a scene from “Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf’s 1925 masterpiece, and shows why the book is a must-read now.

I sit in one of the dives

Artist and photographer Tonika Lewis Johnson and sociologist Maria Krysan compiled Chicagoans’ stories in their new book. The goal was to better understand what can happen when people explore often ig...

5/5: A Prairie Witch, a basketball-crazed daughter of a murdered mother, a scarecrow, a Black photographer for the New Deal with an enchanted camera, and a Polish bachelor farmer walk into the Dust Bo...

3/5: Jumping into a new series at the 22nd book requires a little suspension of disbelief, and in this case, it was a delight. I couldn’t really follow all of the characters, but the ex-head of Israel...

3/5: Another evocative immersion into an Aussie landscape by Jane Harper – this time, a small town in the wine region. Almost all of the action happens over two seasons of the local wine festival. Har...

3/5: Guido Brunetti rides again – walking the neighborhoods of Venice, taking coffee breaks, outwitting his boss – all in the interest of busting a scheme to trick mentally vulnerable older people out...

3/5: A well-researched and fictionalized account of Maria Callas’ upbringing and longtime affair with Aristotle Onassis. Daisy Goodwin flashes back to Callas’ support of her Greek family by singing to...

01 May, 2025 – 31 May, 2025. Created by Marge Anderson

Mothers Living in Abortion Ban States at Significantly Higher Risk of Death During Pregnancy and Childbirth

On marrying down