In times of transition, clarity can be hard to come by, and a lucid observer is invaluable. Such rare voices can seem, in the hubbub, easy to ignore: It has been almost twenty-five years since Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, and yet, rather like the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square, his valiant protest has—so far—failed to halt the juggernaut.

The loss of the particular, private leisure of literary reading seems, arguably, of little importance next to the destruction of our planet. And just as there are those who insist that the ecosystem is perfectly sound, there are many who will contend

Late in the fall of 1999, the renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers retired from teaching, packed up her house in California, and moved into a loft near Union Square in New York City. High above a neighborhood that had once been home to printers and lithographers, Alpers had stunning views, with six windows facing west, two windows facing east, and an eyeful of sky in either direction. Each morning, she watched a play of shadows dance along the walls of adjacent buildings as day broke and sunlight slipped across nearby roofs, water towers, and eclectic architectural details, including a

AMONG THE MANY cautionary examples cited by critics of the US security and surveillance establishment, the German Democratic Republic’s Stasi stands out in bold relief. The organization employed over ninety thousand full-time spies and police—but the truly depressing figure is its nearly two hundred thousand informants (some estimates run as high as two million). Since the wall fell in 1989, films, memoirs, and historical accounts have described a society riven with suspicion among colleagues, friends, and family members; a lot of citizens were their brothers’ keepers. Berlin-based artist Simon

In Promise Land, Jessica Lamb-Shapiro recounts her efforts to conquer one of her multiple phobias by attending a support group called Freedom to Fly. The group’s course, led by a psychologist, met at the Westchester airport and culminated in a round-trip flight to Boston. Lamb-Shapiro secretly had no intention of boarding the flight, but she ultimately mustered the nerve, thanks in part to peer pressure and the charismatic leader. The decisive influence, however, was chemical rather than social. “I had often wondered if taking a pill would prevent me from thinking I was about to die on a plane

During the heyday of the LP, commercial record labels created both fantastic—and fantastically bad—album covers, but the experienced hands of a few and the watchful eyes of the many kept most record cover art more or less within the boundaries of professionalism. The private-press LPs documented in this spectacularly fun coffee-table book routinely cross those boundaries—sometimes with an eye toward the slick, other times toward the sick, but rarely with hopes for anything like popular approval. Although many of the elements found here—stock images, clichéd photo ops, idiosyncratic philosophies,