Jump the Shark
The future of the Democratic Party, aviation history, Shark Week, and Lena Dunham
Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Playing Dead
In the August 2025 issue, Andrew Cockburn diagnoses the state of the Democratic Party. Cockburn visits Nebraska, attending a People’s Town Hall on “the same day that FBI agents arrested a Wisconsin judge and ICE deported a cancer-stricken four-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras.” “The hundreds of thousands of Americans packing into meetings and rallies around the country in the first traumatic months of the year found comfort in the company of others. But for the most part, their hopes for redress lay with the Democratic Party,” writes Cockburn.
In the July 1970 issue, John Kenneth Galbraith examined the Democratic Party’s woes in his political moment. “The Democratic Party has, within a relatively short span, lost its purpose; it has become a defender of the status quo, a role in which it cannot hope to compete with the Republicans,” writes Galbraith. “It was President Truman who said that, faced with a choice between two conservative parties, voters will opt for the real thing.”
Flying Too Close to the Sun
[June 1953]
“Father brought home to us a small toy actuated by a rubber string which would lift itself into the air. We built a number of copies of this toy, which flew successfully … But when we undertook to build a toy on a much larger scale it failed to work so well.”
Read “How We Invented the Airplane” by Orville Wright
[January 1961]
“Aviation is not inherently dangerous, but even more than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, neglect, or incompetence.”
Read “The Pressures Against Air Safety” by Elwood Richard Quesada
[July 2013]
How Boeing’s adoption of defense-contracting practices led to the flawed Dreamliner 787.
Read “Boeing’s Plastic Planes” by Andrew Cockburn
[April 2019]
“A sheer drop feels imminent from even the calmest skies. Because I do not understand aerodynamics, flight is inconceivable.”
Read “Nightmares at 20,000 Feet” by Lisa Wells
Shark Tales
[September 1901]
“The little shark now went his way alone among the peaks. He was growing strong, and his triangular teeth developed saw edges, making the most perfect cutting-machines possible to devise.”
Read “Johnny Shark” by T. Jenkins Hains
[February 1953]
“Man is separated from the shark by an abyss of time. The fish still lives in the late Mesozoic, when the rocks were made: it has changed but little in perhaps three hundred million years. Across the gulf of ages, which evolved other marine creatures, the relentless, indestructible shark has come without need of evolution, the oldest killer, armed for the fray of existence in the beginning.”
Read “Sea Monsters and Sharks at Eye-Level” by Jacques Yves Cousteau
[September 2024]
“When most people think about sharks, they think about sharks as being a threat to you and your family. That’s not true, but it makes people think that sharks are bad, when sharks are good.”
Read “Atticus Fins,” an interview with a marine conservation biologist
From the Archive: Lena Dunham
[December 2020]
“The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby. At age thirty-one, after almost two decades of chronic pain caused by endometriosis and its little-studied ravages, I had my uterus, my cervix, and one of my ovaries removed. Before then, motherhood had seemed likely but not urgent, as inevitable as growing out of jean shorts, but in the days after my surgery I became keenly obsessed with it. Bedbound and tending to the five small laparoscopic holes in my abdomen, I scrolled through adoption websites as if they were furniture outlets. If I could no longer grow a baby in my womb, I could at least get one elsewhere, and fast.”
Read “False Labor” by Lena Dunham