Tag: past couple of years
The Invisible Forces Behind the Books We Read
The ownership of the American publishing house Simon & Schuster has been much in the news over the past couple of years. First Penguin Random House tried to swallow it up, then a fascinating antitrust trial put a bunch of agents and writers on the witness stand. A judge eventually quashed that merger as potentially monopolistic, and more recently, a private-equity fund, KKR, swooped in to buy the company.
If you’re a shareholder or an employee of any of
Tyre Nichols’s Death: Can Memphis Change Its Police Culture?
On Sunday morning, the Reverend Earle Fisher was trying to keep his sermon toned down. He’s the pastor at Abyssinian Baptist, but he was guest-preaching at the more buttoned-down Trinity Christian Methodist Episcopal. The thing is that low-energy Earle Fisher still outpaces most ministers at their most fervid, and this was no typical Sunday.
Fisher, one of Memphis’s most prominent criminal-justice activists, was preaching just two days after the release of video footage of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols
Dan Muessig’s Last Days as a Free Man
On his last night as a free man, Dan Muessig, the internet-famous ex–criminal defense attorney and former pot king of Squirrel Hill, did nothing in particular. By that point, he told me, he wasn’t up to it. He had already shared the melancholy seven-course Italian last supper with family and friends several weeks prior, already bid farewell to his elderly parents, already gazed at the quotidian set dressing of daily life (familiar faces, foliage, streets) and longed for it all
What Makes Images of the War in Ukraine So Urgent
Some of the photos in this article depict graphic scenes of death and injury.
“Words,” the journalist Sebastian Junger once wrote, “are often the primary instrument of liars, and photographic images are the primary instrument of those who insist on the truth.” The photographs that have emerged from the war in Ukraine over the past few weeks have borne essential, indisputable witness to things no human being wishes to see: a mother and her children killed trying to flee a
Can a Planet Be Intelligent? Consider the Biosphere
Almost a century ago, the revolutionary idea of the biosphere gained a foothold in science. Defined as the collective activity of all life on Earth—the tapestry of actions of every microbe, plant, and animal—the biosphere had profound implications for our understanding of planetary evolution. The concept posits that life acts as a potent force shaping how the planet changes over time, on par with other geological systems like the atmosphere, hydrosphere (water), cryosphere (ice), and lithosphere (land). Essentially, life has