Author: Magazine Editor

As Sam Myers delivers an esteemed, international lecture, you can sense the live tension between the deep, emotional urgency of his assessment and the patient, unassailable methodology he believes must drive our response. Sam works at the nexus of accelerating environmental change and human health. He has steadfastly worked to develop an engine of research that addresses complex and critical environmental questions. The evidence that emerges quantifies the human health impacts of large scale, man-made environmental change. Last November in London, Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, was about to start taking questions from the packed audience at...

If this story were to begin the way Patrick Radden Keefe’s stories in The New Yorker do, the first sentence would roll an explicit nugget of juicy fact your way. Craving a few more details, you’d slide right into the second sentence, and you’d be hooked. The title might have been what caught your interest and arrested your casual page-flipping—something like “The Family that Built An Empire of Pain,” or “Solving the Mystery of the Lockerbie Bombing,” or “Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast.” By the end of the first paragraph, you would be bound to continue Patrick’s deep dive into...

The artist Carrie Mae Weems broke the rules when she created her famed photography series, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.” The 19th-century daguerreotypes of slaves in the American South Weems photographed had been commissioned by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who in 1850 sought to prove racial inferiority and create a taxonomy of African slaves’ body types. The daguerreotypes are kept in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, which restricts reproduction of its exhibits. Violating Peabody policy, Weems reframed the images for her exhibit, positioning them with others depicting black people in American history. Ultimately,...

Mary McGowan Davis has consulted, taught and mentored judges, prosecutors and defenders in countries where governments or legal systems are often described as “transitional,” such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Tunisia, and Rwanda. She has also served on United Nations Human Rights Council entities concerned with discerning fact and assuring justice. Mary’s expertise in international human rights and humanitarian law developed over more than 20 years of intrepid, global work. Her legal career began conventionally enough, in New York during the 1970s, where she was a legal aid lawyer representing indigent defendants in criminal appeals. She moved on to be an...