Mother Knows Best
Timeless stories from our 173-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Rafah Gives Biden Pause on American Arms to Israel
[ M A R C H • 1 9 6 4 ]
“On the interlocking relationship between Congress, the Pentagon, and defense contractors–and on its cost to the taxpayer.”
Read “Arms and the Big Money Men” by Julius Duscha
[ J U N E • 2 0 1 9 ]
“Largely out of sight, our gargantuan military machine is also increasingly out of mind, especially when it comes to the ways in which it spends, and misspends, our money.”
Read “The Military-Industrial Virus” by Andrew Cockburn
Google It: Antitrust
[ S E P T E M B E R • 2 0 2 0 ]
How Google, Amazon, and Facebook control our lives.
Read “The Big Tech Extortion Racket” by Barry C. Lynn
Double Trouble: Cicada Cycles Coincide
[ J U N E • 1 9 0 4 ]
“With insects as with men, one cannot escape from his past, even when he seems to emerge therefrom.”
Read “The Strange Cycle of the Cicada” by Henry C. McCook
[ A U G U S T • 2 0 2 3 ]
Cicadas chirp in the background of this Joyce Carol Oates story: “It was not oppressively humid, as it usually is in New Jersey at this time of year. Cicadas thrummed gaily, fields shimmered with bird and insect life.”
Happy Mother’s Day
[ M A Y • 1 9 4 9 ]
Shirley Jackson gets “a little bit off-hand about the whole thing” of giving birth.
Read “The Third Baby’s the Easiest”
[ M A Y • 1 9 9 3 ]
Louise Erdrich grapples with motherhood’s “too many demands, and not enough selves.”
[ O C T O B E R • 2 0 1 5 ]
Rebecca Solnit on why she and Virginia Woolf did not have children.
Read “The Mother of All Questions”