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Environment and climate

Science & Nature

From Restraining Orders to Assassinations, the Dangerous Work of Saving the Monarchs

Monarch butterflies may be gone in thirty years. Saving them seems apolitical, but environmentalists have landed in the sights of drug cartels, illegal loggers, Trump supporters, and even clandestine avocado farmers.

Rob Nixon

Science & Nature

Climate Change’s New Ally: Big Finance

Huge investors like BlackRock are forcing corporations to take action on emissions. But what does their power mean for democracy?

Madison Condon

Class & Inequality, Science & Nature

Pigs and Capital

In a world unraveled by COVID-19, the brutality of factory farming demands we rethink our relationship to animals.

Troy Vettese

Arts in Society, Science & Nature

Imagining American Utopia

Rereleased this year in a single volume, Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Three Californias imagines three possible futures for the world writ large through the lens of Orange County, California.

Dayton Martindale

Science & Nature

Science for Sale

By using a variety of ploys to manufacture doubt, a whole industry of science-for-hire experts helps corporations put profits over public health and safety.

David Michaels

Class & Inequality, Race

American Bottom

Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.

Walter Johnson

Arts in Society

The Bird at the Window

Since 1970 North America has lost 29 percent of its bird population. New York City alone kills almost a quarter of a million birds each year. More than most people, poets have tried to respond to these unremarked—and mostly preventable—deaths.

Calista McRae

Science & Nature

Global Warming, Market Opportunity

On the lure of climate entrepreneurism.

Troy Vettese

Reading Lists, Science & Nature

“Listen to the Science”

Are scientists more virtuous than the rest of us? Can religion and science be happily reconciled? 

Matt Lord, Boston Review

Science & Nature

Apocalypse Now

What Brazilian conservatives gain by letting the Amazon burn.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi

Philosophy & Religion

The Gospel of Oil

Oil’s grip on U.S. society is as much religious as economic, a new history shows.

Kim Phillips-Fein

Reading Lists, Science & Nature

Highway to Hell

A reading list for our time of climate crisis. 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

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THINKING IN A PANDEMIC

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