Salman Rushdie’s 2015 novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, saw the Indian-born British American author take on the role of Scheherazade by spinning numerous fabulous tales and spawning umpteen exotic characters. It was set in New York in an epoch marked by so-called strangenesses where good and evil genies battled, catastrophic disasters raged, […]
California environmentalists have discovered that when it comes to renewable energy, you can have too much of a good thing. Thanks to heavily subsidized solar panel installation, the state now has too much power, sending electricity prices negative, but only during the daytime. At night, Californians are out of luck. As spring arrives and summer […]
Most alternate histories are built around a grand conceit: What would have happened if Booth’s bullet missed Lincoln or if the Nazis built an atomic bomb? For All Mankind, which recently concluded its fourth season on Apple TV+, offers a more modest counterfactual: How different would things be if the Soviets beat us to the […]
Fifty-seven years ago this May, Israel was in grave danger. The charismatic Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that the Straits of Tiran would be closed to Israeli shipping. Nasser was preparing for war and assembling a coalition that would eventually include Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon. “Our goal is clear,” Iraqi President Abdel Rahman […]
Some one and a half million of the victims of the Holocaust were children. A small number survived on their own, but most were saved by programs like Kindertransport and One Thousand Children that removed them from their homeland and transported them to safer countries. Others became part of a group known as the Hidden […]
Rwanda is an astonishing country: safe, prosperous, orderly, and open. Its success is remarkable enough given the rough neighborhood in which it finds itself. But when you think that 30 years ago this month, it was in the throes of the worst mass slaughter of the late 20th century, its achievements look miraculous. I have […]
The University of California, San Diego, is coming up with creative ways to implement a form of affirmative action for admittance into its engineering programs. Affirmative action was illegal in California long before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that colleges and universities could no longer consider an applicant’s race when admitting him or […]
One of the cultural casualties of the internet, that cultural cataclysm, has been to writerly brevity. Once, writers were constrained by the available space on a newspaper or magazine page, a truly scarce resource. But these days, they can go on and on and on. We are inundated by long reads, deep dives, and podcasts […]
The most vociferous crusaders in the ostensible campaign against climate change often sound less concerned with tackling greenhouse gas emissions and more with undermining pro-growth capitalism. Introducing her magnum opus, The Climate Book, anti-global warming avatar Greta Thunberg blamed the phenomenon on “racist, oppressive extractivism that is exploiting both people and the planet to maximize […]