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David Lynch at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2002

The Inimitable Weirdness of David Lynch

The filmmaker, who died this week, mixed the menacing with the everyday, the banal with the surreal and sublime.

Examining photographs of a Soviet spy trawler taken during a reconnaissance flight over the Atlantic, 1968

When America’s Top Spies Were Academics and Librarians

How scholars achieved some of the most consequential intelligence victories of the twentieth century

Melody Schreiber

America’s Coming Public Health Crisis

USDA workers responding to an outbreak of Avian flu at a turkey farm in Minnesota, 2015

Melody Schreiber

America’s Coming Public Health Crisis

Books & the Arts

Illustration of author Alan Hollinghurst

Scott Bradfield

Alan Hollinghurst’s Elegy for Britain

At the heart of “Our Evenings” is the recognition that Britain had something beautiful once and threw it all away.

A collection of historical contraceptive devices.

The Battle for Birth Control Could Have Gone Differently

Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett each had a different vision of reproductive freedom. Would reproductive rights be more secure if Dennett’s had prevailed?