Egg On Your Face
Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Doggone It
[ S E P T E M B E R • 2 0 1 8 ]
“Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, I have been talking to people in and around the labor movement, going on the premise that American workers may soon be engaged in a virtual Armageddon with capital.”
Read “Labor's Last Stand” by Garret Keizer
[ J A N U A R Y • 2 0 1 5 ]
Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley.
Read “Come With Us If You Want to Live” by Sam Frank
[ J A N U A R Y • 2 0 1 9 ]
On the rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism.
Read “Machine Politics” by Fred Turner
[ J A N U A R Y • 2 0 1 8 ]
“Silicon Valley is pushing hard to take on functions that used to be performed by national governments, but globally and at a cost that local providers cannot compete with. The leaders of the major tech corporations are received by governments with the honors that correspond to a head of state.”
Read “Don't Be Evil,” an excerpt from Women, Whistleblowing, WikiLeaks: A Conversation, by Renata Avila, Sarah Harrison, and Angela Richter
Out of Cluck
[ A P R I L • 2 0 1 4 ]
“The arrival of the eggs makes me believe in better things. I don’t mean better than eggs—there is nothing better—but better than most of the things we have been having. I shall bless you as long as they continue, and even when they have stopped—for the memory of them. But pray don’t let them stop yet awhile.” —Henry James
Read “In the Cage” by Colin Richmond
[ D E C E M B E R • 1 8 9 7 ]
“A bird’s egg may seem to the casual reader a very trivial subject for a magazine essay; yet no less a man of letters than Thomas Wentworth Higginson declared it the most perfect thing in existence.”
Read “A Bird’s Egg” by Ernest Ingersoll
[ N O V E M B E R • 2 0 1 4 ]
Over uneasy: cracking the secrets of industrial egg farming.
Read “Cage Wars” by Deb Olin Unferth
Unaided
[ F E B R U A R Y • 1 9 6 3 ]
“Uncertainty over ends and means in foreign aid made it easy for determined foes of the program to use the weaknesses of one kind of aid as a club to beat all kinds.”
Read “Foreign Aid: Saved by The Bell?” by Joseph Kraft
[ S E P T E M B E R • 2 0 0 8 ]
“The traditional instruments for reconstruction and diplomacy—the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—have been relegated to bit parts in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Read “Human Quicksand” by Steve Featherstone
[ F E B R U A R Y • 1 9 5 7 ]
“Our natural tendency has been to gauge the need for aid at the lowest amount that will avert disaster. But if our purpose is literally to help the underdeveloped areas reach a level of self-sustaining growth, then it is in our interest to provide, not as little as we can get away with, but as much as they can efficiently use.”
Read “Foreign Aid: Is it still necessary?” by Dan Lacy
If Music Be the Food of Love
[ J A N U A R Y • 2 0 2 5 ]
Spotify’s plot against musicians.
Read “The Ghosts in the Machine” by Liz Pelly
[ M A R C H • 1 9 9 8 ]
“The inescapable subtext here was that pop music was in dire need of a future.”
Read “Pop Music in the Shadow of Irony” by Thomas Frank
[ A P R I L • 2 0 1 2 ]
Paying respects to the Queen of Soul.
Read “Aretha” by Anthony Heilbut
[ W E B - O N L Y • S E P T E M B E R • 2 0 2 4 ]
Notes on a one-man punk band.
Read “Images of America in Rock and Roll” by Randal Doane