Bit by Bit
Timeless stories from our 173-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Famine Looms in Gaza
[ J U N E • 2 0 0 9 ]
“The main reason for the world food problem is political.”—Mahmoud al Habash, the Palestinian minister of agriculture in 2009
Read “Let Them Eat Cash” by Frederick Kaufman
[ J U N E • 1 9 7 4 ]
A surgeon describes the medical effects of starvation on the body.
Read “Strangulation in the Open Air” by Richard Selzer
[ A P R I L • 1 9 4 9 ]
A postwar analysis of the U.N.’s agencies and aid capabilities.
Read “What’s Good about the U.N.” by Edith Iglauer
Nationally Guarded: NY Governor Pushes for Subway Bag Searches
[ J U N E • 1 9 6 0 ]
“We have paid dearly for our preference for automobiles…in the end, mass rail transportation remains of crucial importance.”
Read “How to Rescue New York from its Port Authority” by Edward T. Chase
[ D E C E M B E R • 2 0 0 4 ]
“Doom and romance on a subway platform”: Jonathan Lethem’s subterranean memories of Brooklyn.
Read “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn”
[ J A N U A R Y • 1 8 9 6 ]
The Tube, at a few decades in service, had “long ceased to be a marvel” to a well-traveled American expat in London.
Read “London’s Underground Railways” by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
Bitcoin Booms
[ M A R C H • 2 0 2 2 ]
Will Stephenson among the Bitcoin maximalists.
[ M A R C H • 2 0 2 3 ]
From gold rush to fool’s gold: fawning over cryptocurrency’s erstwhile king.
[ F E B R U A R Y • 1 9 4 4 ]
“We shall not hear the ironic laughter of the gods who granted us our desire to have money. We shall be rich. And we shall be destitute.”
Read “The Touch of Midas” by George Richmond Walker
Dune It Again
[ D E C E M B E R • 1 9 7 3 ]
Frank Herbert, author of Dune, on “the dangerous business of wishing for absolutes in a relativistic universe.”
Read “Listening to the Left Hand”