Images above: Glaciers from the Vatnajökull ice cap, in Iceland
Brendan Pattengale is a photographer who explores how color can convey emotions in an image. In his photo illustrations throughout this article, the colors of the original photos have been adjusted, but the images are otherwise unaltered.
This article was published online on February 3, 2021.
Updated at 1:53 p.m. ET on February 11, 2021.
We live on a wild planet, a wobbly, erupting, ocean-sloshed orb that careens around a giant thermonuclear explosion in the void. Big rocks whiz by overhead, and here on the Earth’s surface, whole continents crash together, rip apart, and occasionally turn inside out, killing nearly everything. Our planet is fickle. When the unseen tug of celestial bodies points Earth toward a new North Star, for instance, the shift in sunlight can dry up the Sahara, or fill it with hippopotamuses. Of more immediate interest today, a variation in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere of as li
The Trump administration’s partisan takeover of the United States’ international broadcasters failed. What’s to prevent a future administration from trying again?
The Democrats’ Last Chance to Save Democracy
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Supporters of Donald Trump assaulted the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but American democracy has been under siege for far longer from both former President Trump and the Republican Party. Trump’s transgressions against democracy are well known: They include having attacked the press as the “enemy of the people,” assailed sitting judges, politicized the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies, undermined transparency in government, encouraged political violence, and delegitimized elections.
The Republican Party’s undermining of democracy began much earlier. Since about 2000, the party has tried to suppress Democratic votes through stringent voter-identification laws and purges of voter rolls. In addition, Republican legislatures have grotesquely gerrymandered legislative districts, enabling Republicans to maintain control of state legislatures and, at times, the House of Representative