Hand Holding a Pocket Watch

Keeping Time: A New Year’s Collection

A selection of stories that chronicle our complicated notions of time.
Group of soldiers of mandatory military service at the Sergeant Cabral NCO School, Campo de Mayo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1977.

The Committed Officers of Argentina’s Dirty War

The viciousness of Argentina’s Dirty War resulted not only from orders from above but from ideological buy-in at the ground level.
A cairn commemorating Angus McMillan in Stratford, Victoria, Australia

Founding Murderers vs. Founding Fathers in Australia

Eighteen stone cairns were set up in 1926 to mark the route purportedly taken by Angus McMillan into Gunaikurnai Country in 1840. Should they remain?
Francis Gary Powers holding a model of a U-2 during the Senate Armed Services Select Committee hearing on the 1960 U-2 incident.

Unforgettable Fire: The U-2 Incident 

Reports on the May 1960 downing of an American U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union offer a case study in Cold War posturing and misdirection.
William Butler Yeats with his wife Georgie Hyde Lees, 1923

Yeats and the Occult Imagination

Beneath his poems lay a lifelong devotion to magic, divination, and a visionary system that shaped his most prophetic work.
An organ grinder stands on a sidewalk, playing music as a young girl dances in front of him, New York City, ca. 1935

A War on Street Music in NYC

In the New Deal era, New York City banned street musicians, classifying them as beggars. Some New Yorkers fought back.
Source: Getty/Downtown Arlington

The Power of Placemaking

Why the social, political, and emotional dimensions of public spaces matter, and how people themselves play a central role in creating them.
The public sitting area of IBM Building on 56th and Madison in Manhattan, 2009

POPS Goes the City: Privately Owned Public Space and Its Discontents

Why is so much of the “public space” in cities actually private, and who benefits from it being that way?
Snowflake Waltz in the White Forest (The Nutcracker Act I, Scene III) performed by The New York City Ballet in 1954.

Making Sense of The Nutcracker’s Libretto

Early audiences loved it, even as critics questioned its structure. Returning to the story helps illuminate what makes the ballet so strangely captivating.
Several thousand reindeer rounded up for slaughter in northern Sweden in 1988, following the Chernobyl accident.

The Radioactive Reindeer Problem

Cold War nuclear testing left troubling levels of Cesium-137 in caribou, prompting years of research into Arctic fallout and its risks to human health.