March 2011

Alaska Governor’s Mansion by Elvin Lim As the race for the Republican nomination warms up, it is too early to tell who would head the party’s ticket next Fall. But there is more to understanding politics than predicting the horse races, and for those ready to look, there are already patterns emerging...

Clockwise from top left: Nuclear power plants at Windscale, Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl From Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: As an anthropologist, I am always interested in what humans learn from their mistakes. Can humans change their behavior, thereby improving their chances of survival, not just through...

Amy Chua and her daughters From The Atlantic: Right now, in admissions offices in Cambridge and New Haven and Palo Alto, the teenage children of some of America’s most thoughtful and devoted mothers are coming in for exceptionally close scrutiny—as is, so these women feel, the parenting they have...

Are the world’s megacities becoming a sprawling, overfed, and uncontrollable mass that needs to be restrained for the good of society and the environment?

As an immigrant from Ireland settled in Nebraska for an extended period, I was immediately excited to seek out the landscapes that comprise the American West...

by Deborah Dash Moore Jews of the Pacific Coast: Reinventing Community on America’s Edge, by Ellen Eisenberg, Ava F. Kahn, and William Toll, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 336 pp. Three talented historians, Ellen Eisenberg, Ava F. Kahn, and William Toll, have teamed up to write this history of...

He had become my Tarzan | by Jason Haslam

Open Letters Monthly

More than any other of Burroughs’ many creations, Tarzan has become a staple of popular culture, a process which began almost immediately...

Rashtrapati Bhawan From The Caravan: Is there an Indian way of thinking? The poet and scholar AK Ramanujan considered the question at length in a celebrated essay on the subject. The answer, he decided, would depend on which word of the question one chose to stress. The same is...