April 2014 Archives
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Realpolitiking
The Bill of the Century
The Civil Rights Act, which marks its 50th anniversary this year, changed the shape of American society. The story of how it finally passed is just as remarkable.
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Gallery
Days of the Dead
Large-scale, hand-drilled portraits—where pixels are drilled from enormous blown-up photographs—of people killed in Mexico’s drug wars.
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Our Passions, Our Day Jobs
Essaying Through Life
A youthful pledge to become an essayist gets lost.
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Explainers
Who Goes There
The Heartbleed Bug exposed a well-known secret: Passwords suck. But that’s really nothing new—just ask the Romans. Explaining the password’s past and future.
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Gallery
The Internet Is So Loud
Large-scale abstract paintings that recall networks, maps, and schematic diagrams—and with each subsequent viewing can become anything at all.
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The Arts Desk
Demolish Me
The present-day lust for ruins is nothing new. In fact, it’s nearly as old as any ruins themselves. From a flattened Louvre to Percy Bysshe Shelley, a journey to the dawn of ruin porn.
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The Unexpected
Chrissy Smoked
Twice a year, a group of friends gathered in a coal-mining pocket of Pennsylvania—friends in their twenties with fragile identities, who didn’t know yet what would happen.
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Gallery
Frontcountry
Photographs of life inside a mining boom, from Montana to Texas, that’s producing a new, modern version of the Wild West.
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Letters From Chicago
Private Eye
Her neighbors remember her as “the bag lady,” but Vivian Maier was secretly a street photographer who would leave behind an artistic trove that captured the public’s imagination.
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Purple America
The Least Likely of Objects
Dreams of a Matalin-Carville romance tempt a young Washington journalist covering the death of a dictator to cross party lines in pursuit of love.
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Gallery
American Library
Photographs from a new book of American public libraries—some famous, some neglected, some both—plus an essay by former Poet Laureate Charles Simic.
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The Travel Desk
One Small Store
Two men, separated by more than 150 years, discover the folly of attempting Western-style capitalism in Micronesia.