The New Yorker

The Case Against Civilization

Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the invention of agriculture was a catastrophe for human health, equality, and freedom — we should never have started farming.

Were Pirates Foes of the Modern Order—or Its Secret Sharers?

Daniel Immerwahr surveys the old myths and the new scholarship about the uses of piracy amid the rise of slavery, colonialism, and empire building.

Does It Help to Know History?

One lesson of history is that even doing the right thing rarely works out.

The Big Dig

Elif Batuman writes about the historical relics that held up the construction of the Yenikapı station, and about President Erdoğan’s frustration.

Sleeping with the Enemy

What happened between the Neanderthals and us?

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

Douglas Preston on the young paleontologist who may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth.

Perfect Past

Nabokov's crystalline recreation of a Russian childhood — the precise rendering of memory's textures and colors, and the impossibility of recovering what has been perfectly loved.

The Search for Marvin Gardens

“The Search for Marvin Gardens” by John McPhee was published in the print edition of the September 9, 1972, issue of The New Yorker.

They All Just Went Away

Oates explores her childhood compulsion to enter abandoned farmhouses in upstate New York — meditating on what emptied spaces contain and what the imagination makes of lives that have left no other trace.

Graven Images

Bellow meditates on the photographs and images that have formed his inner life — and on memory, loss, and the strange power of the visual to outlast the people it depicts.