Tangent

Camel Milk Mixology

Nina Munk's The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty reports on the Millennium Villages Project—and, in some ways, it’s the story of how Western economists fail to understand camels.

Why Being Too Adaptable Isn't Adaptive

The good news is that human beings can adapt to some of the worst environmental devastation. The bad news—As J.B. MacKinnon writes in his new book, The Once and Future World—is that once we've adapted, devastation becomes the new normal.

Just Getting By in a ‘Civilized Community’

What does it mean when the minimum wage is impossible to live on—and what does it suggest about how our lives should be?

How to Look at Poor People

Paul Theroux’s The Last Train to Zona Verde describes a visit to the South African slum of Langa. Obviously, “slum tourism” is exploitative and dehumanizing. But we can’t avert our eyes at poverty, so what is the right way to look?

The Rhyme as Palliative

David Rakoff's Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish is a novel in verse, a device which—while it may seem benign—can be a crystalline lens for the dark and absurd.

Preparing for the End of the World

By the end of the century, several of the world’s major cities could be underwater; flooding and other catastrophes could make short work of the world as we know it. What are we doing about this?

Who Are We, Really?

In 2007, the author’s mother received a strange email from a relative she didn't know existed. We turn to DNA analysis in pursuit of who we are, out of narcissistic self-obsession, and, as Carolyn Abraham’s The Juggler’s Children shows, to feel less alone.

||Day 14 of Occupy Wall St., view from Zuccotti Park of march against police brutality. Photo by David Shankbone.
The Art of the Inexact

Two years later, it's still unclear what Occupy meant (or means). But as David Graeber's new book reminds us, maybe that's for the best—in both art and politics, ambiguity is a useful ingredient.

How to Spy Better

Data mining works for preventing credit card fraud; less so for foiling terror plots. How the NSA’s surveillance strategy might be less effective than that of the neighbourhood gossip.

||Tzeporah Berman. Image on homepage by Garth Lenz via Island Press Field Notes
The Great Bear Compromise

Tzeporah Berman's life's work has been negotiating the impossible: finding room for compromise between eco-activists and logging companies.