Fault Lines
Timeless stories from our 173-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Aftershocks
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William T. Vollmann’s letter from the edge of the Fukushima disaster.
Read “Invisible and Insidious”
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Edwidge Danticat on the sociopolitical aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake.
[ S E P T E M B E R • 1 9 7 5 ]
Measuring the effect of the inevitable big one.
The Path of Totality
[ N O V E M B E R • 1 9 7 3 ]
Andrew Weil gazes into the 1970 eclipse over southern Mexico.
[ J A N U A R Y • 1 9 2 5 ]
Harlow Shapley, then the director of the Harvard College Observatory, explains the science of eclipses “on this and other planets,” 99 years ago.
[ O C T O B E R • 2 0 2 2 ]
Rachel Kushner traces the path of totality through the phases of her life.
IDF Kills Aid Workers in Gaza
[ J A N U A R Y • 1 9 4 6 ]
“This time we would be ready when the guns ceased fire. This time relief would be truly international, free from political control and group prejudice…Now the promises have been broken.”
Read “Why UNRRA Has Failed” by John Perry
[ D E C E M B E R • 2 0 1 1 ]
“Water here is a language, and a weapon.”
Read “Drip, Jordan” by Ben Ehrenreich
Remembering John Barth
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“Among the opportunities of Postmodernism, for the novelist, is the quixotic revivification–with the right irony to leaven its pathos and the right passion to vitalize the irony–of that noble category of literature, the exhaustive but inexhaustible, exhilarating novel; the long long story that, like life at its best, we wish might never end, yet treasure the more because we know it must.”
[ O C T O B E R • 1 9 7 2 ]
“Stories last longer than men, stones than stories, stars than stones.”
[ J A N U A R Y • 1 9 9 4 ]
“The story of our life is not our life; it is our story…This story will never end. This story ends.”