With overlapping civil wars in Syria and Iraq, a new flare-up of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, and tense nuclear talks with Iran, Middle Eastern politics are more volatile than ever ...

“Manhattan is just all bank branches,” said Jonathan Franzen as he walked through the living room of his home in Santa Cruz, California. When he visits his former neighborhood on the Upper East Side ...

Is genetically engineered food dangerous? Many people seem to think it is. In the past five years, companies have submitted more than 27,000 products to the Non-GMO Project, which certifies goods that ...

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA—Until the summer of 2014, 16-year-old Florence Mbabazi had spent all of her short life in northern Rwanda’s Gihembe Refugee Camp, a humming sprawl of more than 3,000 mud houses with ...

U.S. soldiers patrol a checkpoint southeast of Baghdad on Sept. 6, 2007. Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters U.S. Army Specialist Stephanie Charboneau sat at the center of a complex trucking network in ...

Citizen Kane’s Xanadu fell into disrepair before it was ever finished. Hogwarts is now a tourist trap in Florida. Even Eloise’s quarters at the Plaza Hotel have recently been relocated to Brooklyn. Of ...

Though it may look cool, the Herman Miller Rollback chair of 1977 is not the perfect office chair. Office chairs are like shoes, but not as much fun. We spend much of our time in them. They emphasize ...

Wikimedia Commons/White House Historical Association It’s a familiar chapter in our history, part of the triumphant narrative of westward expansion: In 1803, the United States bought a massive chunk ...

In his 1919 manual for screenwriters, Ten Million Photoplay Plots, Wycliff Aber Hill provided this taxonomy of possible types of dramatic "situations," first running them down in outline form, then ...

The button—with its self-contained roundness and infinite variability—has a quiet perfection to it. Running a cascade of buttons through your fingers feels satisfyingly heavy, like coins or candy; ...

Racist views of Germans as warlike and subhuman seem preposterous now but plausible at the time. The paradox of racism is that at any given moment, the racism of the day seems reasonable and very ...

What would America be without dessert? It would be puritanical. It would be boring. It would be healthier, probably. Thankfully for our collective culture, if not our blood sugar levels, America is a ...