metazine

Does the ivory-billed woodpecker still exist?

Searching for evil and finding ourselves amidst a haunting pattern of cattle mutilations in the West

"Legend says they slumber inches beneath the surface of arroyos and emerge to mate only when water flows. "

An artist renders beauty in death

Or "North America’s answer to Nessie"

New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani plans to absorb individual costs into the collective life of the city, but whether that will be enough is an open question.

Narendra Modi is pursuing his vision of “developed India” through distorted claims of progress, stolen elections, and anti-Muslim policies.

What does a fair policy of museum repatriation look like? A new book considers the issue in terms of human rights, cultural sovereignty, and stewardship.

Ross Douthat’s usual contrarian approach, in his recent book Believe, leads to a curiously impotent, watered-down account of religious experience.

I’m writing this in the last days of the northern hemisphere’s autumn in 2025. Over recent weeks we’ve seen a hurricane hit Jamaica with wind speeds a few

David Szalay’s recent novel Flesh captures with unsparing accuracy the consciousness of an ordinary man in helpless decline.

Erik Satie took down the arrogance of late Romantic classical music, gently but ruthlessly taking up its vocabulary and removing all the excess, including authorship.

In Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, to die is an awfully big adventure—and so is to live.

Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni both confronted, in different brutal ways, the challenges of governing a postcolonial nation.

How did the Mason–Dixon Line—meant to resolve a longstanding colonial border dispute—come to represent the US’s foundational divide between slavery and freedom?

Maria Bamford’s wild and constantly inventive stand-up style relies on her never flinching from the most difficult realities.

Little known today, Fitz-James O’Brien deserves serious attention for developing some of science fiction’s most familiar tropes—among them microcosmic worlds, invisible monsters, time slips, and robots.

A rare genetic mutation is best treated the nineteenth-century way, with bloodletting, showing up the strengths and weaknesses of the NHS.

As federal services deteriorate, a patchwork of private companies is taking their place — for better or for worse.

Only a few years ago, if you popped open a can of soda anywhere in the United States, the container you held more likely than not contained bits of magnesium harvested from the Great Salt Lake. Now, the country’s supply of the critical mineral looks uncertain.