In Brian Francis Slattery’s novel, Lost Everything, which won the 2012 Philip K. Dick award, two friends, Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim, travel on a mission up the Susquehanna River, in an apocalyptic, not-too-distant future, in which climate change and civil war have transformed the Northeast into a tropical wasteland, replete with monkeys climbing over…

I’ve been musing for some time on the apocalyptic, which seems to be everywhere these days. Who better to explain the origins of all these zombie movies than world-renowned theologian Bernard McGinn? McGinn helps me understand the Christian and pre-Christian origins of the apocalyptic. Even more fascinating, he suggests that the apocalyptic may have fundamentally…

In his new book, Nature’s Best Hope, Tallamy argues that we should view our own gardens as a piece of the biggest national park in the country, what he calls the Homegrown National Park. This speaks to what we grow in our gardens – we need to provide food and shelter for wildlife – but…

Is it possible that opposition to GMOs on the left resembles climate change denial on the right? This is one of the startling things that emerges in my conversation with Nick Kaplinsky, specialist in genomics and chair of the biology department at Swarthmore College, with whom I discuss Nina Fedoroff’s book Mendel in the Kitchen on…