Tag: wider world
Why the Puzzle-Box Sci-Fi of ‘Severance’ Works
At a time when the American office is anywhere a Zoom window can be opened, the notion of truly separating work and home is an alluring one. Take that thought to its furthest extreme and you have the Apple TV+ thriller Severance. The dystopian sci-fi starring Adam Scott makes “work-life balance” an actual divide in its characters’ consciousnesses; a special surgery allows them to switch between their work and home selves on their elevator commutes to and from their
This Is No Time for Passive Patriotism
Every nation is a story. It’s almost never a simple one, and the story’s meaning is usually contested. National identity itself depends upon how we tell the story—about our past, our present moment, and our future.
Many national stories are rooted in a particular ethnicity or religion that forms the core of that national identity. Here in the United States, things are more complicated. Since our founding, our national identity has been the story that we tell ourselves
The Biologists Stranded on an Erupting Alaskan Volcano
On the evening of August 6, 2008, on a remote island in Alaska’s Aleutian chain, the side of a volcano began crumbling into the turquoise waters of its crater lake. Gulls fled from the falling rock. The wind whistled around Chris Ford as he peered over the lip of the crater. “It’s starting to get tumbling down pretty good,” he shouted into his radio.
Ford had climbed up the volcano’s steep slope to get a bird’s-eye view of the small