In the 1960s, while the young Vladimir Putin was dreaming of joining the KGB, others of his age cohort were busy memorizing the lyrics of Beatles songs, growing their hair long, and adopting the freewheeling lifestyles and attitudes of hippies.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part II

Soviet perestroika and "new thinking" did not appear from nowhere, nor were they merely a forced retreat under material decline; the ideas behind them had incubated inside Soviet expert communities for two decades before Gorbachev embraced them and became their political bearer.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part II

The controls and the oppression were very real, but only some Communist states at particular times came close enough to total control from above to meet criteria that make it reasonable to call them totalitarian rather than authoritarian.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part II

The diversity within the communist world and within particular countries is often forgotten.

Everyday life under communism is usually pictured as total control and silent conformity. Three historians were asked what that picture leaves out. Their answers find life going on beneath it in different places: churches full in Poland and banned in Albania, reformers quietly at work inside Soviet institutes, and Soviet teenagers memorizing Beatles lyrics.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part II

Mysticism without religion, and the fungus that made it possible.

A small brown mushroom travels from ritual use in the mountains of central Mexico to university labs and pharmaceutical boardrooms. Along the way it gathers many of the modern age's hopes, from mystical experience outside religion to the next profitable drug.

Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion

A very powerful woman's story

A storm on the first night, the fear of being out of reach, and twenty years of anthropology among women migrants. Why film can carry a story further than an academic article, and the daily ethics of telling it.

Rescue

Even at 1.5 °C, Antarctica loses ice this century. How much is our choice.

Beneath a floating ice shelf, warm water thins the brake that holds back the glaciers behind it. Under very high emissions the dominoes fall, and Antarctica alone could add as much as 25 centimeters to sea level by 2100. Taking that seriously would change coastal planning and where research looks next.

Committed Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss by the end of the twenty-first century

Intertidal oyster reefs live for millennia and prevent shoreline erosion but not climate change.

Oyster reefs are being restored as breakwaters and promoted as carbon sinks. Cores from 25 reefs in North Carolina show they grow with sea level, and that the shells they build give back the carbon they bury.

Sea level-induced oyster reef accretion causes minimal net carbon burial change