Alex Remnick

Farming techniques of the early 20th century certainly exacerbated Dust Bowl conditions across the Southwest. Some farmers practiced a technique called listing, a type of plowing that was thought to reduce erosion. But instead, Bolles said, listing “broke up soil surface crusts and churned up silt-size particles, which are easily picked up by wind.” So […]

Hirschfeld spent much of his life researching and writing about gender issues and sexuality, gathering information through extensive interviews with members of Berlin’s queer subculture. In his 1904 book “Berlin’s Third Sex,” he wrote: Any well-informed person will soon notice that the streets and pleasure spots of Berlin boast not just men and women in […]

The results of LeMay’s strategy were devastating. On March 10, 1945, the United States carried out Operation Meetinghouse, an air raid of Tokyo that killed more than 90,000 Japanese, most of them civilians, and displaced over a million people. While later operations were more successful at hitting their much larger targets, the firebombing of Japan […]

Over the course of the demonstrations, two more pigs were taken into custody, including a sow dubbed Mrs. Pigasus. The three little pigs were transferred to the Anti-Cruelty Society, where they received frequent visits from concerned Yippies. Eventually, the Pigasus family — by then a political dynasty in its own right — ended up on […]