Around 2001, Christopher Schaberg noticed that The New Yorker magazine – that bastion of hip, cosmopolitan literary culture – frequently carried car ads depicting romantic mountain landscapes. This struck him as an odd juxtaposition, not just between the urbanity of The New Yorker and the wilderness of Suburu, Lincoln Aviator, and Chevy Blazer ads, but…
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When my daughter was eight years old, she came home one day and announced that she “knew what the B word was.” But she was confused: why was a word for a female dog – the most awesome of creatures, in her mind – also an insult for girls and women? She’d inadvertently hit on…
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How fragile is our economy? Can it rebound from the impact of the shutdown and – similarly – from stresses climate change might inflict in the future? These are some of the questions I’ve found myself asking during the Covid pandemic. Looming over all of these was a broader and more troubling question: were the…
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Inspired by real, natural phenomena – from parasitic wasps to zombie ants and the hive mind – Invasive Species tells a story of a new predator that threatens the “end of days” for humans. But this doesn’t necessarily mean an end to the story. As a former science writer who has written about evolution and,…
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