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Environment and climate

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

Science & Nature

It Was Not Supposed to End This Way

The Anthropocene challenges liberalism’s vision of permanent progress. So why has it become another technocratic tool of liberal bureaucracy?

Geoff Mann

Global Justice

Remembering the Golden Spike Ceremony

The completion of the first transcontinental railroad 150 years ago is remembered as an iconic moment in the history of U.S. westward expansion. But there are other ways to understand the railroad’s significance, and its sharp resonance for our times.

Manu Karuka

Reading Lists

Haiti, Disaster, and Revolution

Suffering in Haiti is a manmade, not a natural, disaster.

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Science & Nature

Climate Gut Check

Beneath the jargon, a new UN report serves up a revolutionary response to climate change.

Troy Vettese

Politics, Science & Nature

No Collision

In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies?

Bonnie Honig

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