Browse Sections
The Sun Interview
Signs Of Intelligent Life
Carl Safina’s Evidence That Other Animals Think And Feel
And each year we kill for food billions of animals we raise as prisoners and whose lives are often more terrible than their deaths. Even if we do continue eating animals, we could do much better by them and raise them more humanely. The way people treat animals affects the way they treat people: if you brutalize animals, you are probably hardhearted toward humans, too.
August 2016
Who Are You Calling Crazy?
Gary Greenberg On How We Define Mental Illness — And How It Defines Us
Mental illness is a function of consciousness, and consciousness is something we see through a glass darkly. We simply are not prepared to understand it with the same certainty that we are prepared to understand, say, liver disease.
July 2016
The Skeleton Gets Up And Walks
Craig Childs On How The World Is Always Ending
We think of apocalypse as a moment — a flash of light, then you’re gone — but if we study the earth’s history, we find that it’s not one moment. It’s actually a long process. In fact, it’s hard to see where it begins or ends. Like right now: evidence indicates that we’re experiencing the planet’s sixth mass extinction — a period when the rate of extinction spikes and the diversity and abundance of life decrease. Each such extinction event takes hundreds of thousands of years to play out, and it’s generally 5 to 8 million years before the previous levels of biodiversity return. So are we at the end or the beginning of a cycle? This could just be a temporary spike. The pattern could swerve in a different direction.
June 2016
Righteous Babe
Ani DiFranco On Music, Politics, And Staying Independent
You have to practice tuning out the noise of the culture to hear the messages transmitted from your gut and your heart. You have to become like a bird-watcher and be vigilant and develop the skills to spot and name the quick flash of awareness in yourself.
May 2016
Two Ways Of Knowing
Robin Wall Kimmerer On Scientific And Native American Views Of The Natural World
I prefer to ask what gifts the land offers. Gifts require a giver, a being with agency. Gifts invite reciprocity. Gifts help form relationships. Scientists aren’t comfortable with the word gifts, so we get ecosystem services instead. These terms arise from different worldviews, but both recognize the way the land sustains life.
April 2016
Embracing Ignorance
Jack Miles On His Path From Belief To Disbelief And Back
We’re all stuck with ignorance as we move from quandary to quandary. What I want to do is make a case for religion as one of the means to cope with this irremediable human condition.
March 2016
The Kids Are All Right
David Lancy Questions Our Assumptions About Parenting
Parenting trends are less about what’s good for the child and more about parents’ need for affirmation. The message of my work is that parents have far less impact than they think they do.
February 2016
The Miracle In Front Of You
Raymond Barfield On Practicing Medicine With Compassion
You have to notice beauty when it appears. That means you have to show up and shut up. If I could give just one piece of advice to all medical students, I would say, “Show up completely, and then shut up for at least two minutes while the miracle in front of you tells you who they are and how you can help them.” If every doctor did just that one thing, it would change medicine.
January 2016
It’s Her Choice
Katha Pollitt On The Struggle Over Abortion Rights
If one in three women has had an abortion, you can’t really talk about it as some rare practice indulged in only by particularly evil women. . . . What do you do with that one-third of women? . . . Put them in prison?
December 2015
Great Expectations
Jennifer Senior On Modern Parenthood And Its Discontents
I was amazed to read about the New York City newsboys’ strike in 1899, which ultimately improved conditions and raised wages. You had these armies of seven-, eight-, and nine-year-olds bringing the entire newspaper business to its knees. They organized and won. Today we don’t even let our nine-year-olds go on the subway by themselves.
November 2015
