Samuel Matlack

Jan 22, 2024 | thenewatlantis.com | John Last |Samuel Matlack |Clare Coffey |Travis Kavulla

Sign in or Subscribe Now for audio version Sandwiched between two national parks on a winding mountain road, the Alpine village of Caldes, Italy, is so small as to barely warrant a label on most maps. With its thirteenth-century castle perched over a valley filled with apple orchards, nourished by the rushing waters of the river Noce, it seems an idyllic slice of rural Alpine life.

May 31, 2023 | thenewatlantis.com | Samuel Matlack |Travis Kavulla |Clare Coffey |Ted Nordhaus

On the Galápagos island of Floreana, a giant tortoise went extinct some 150 years ago, after human settlement. Conservationists are now working to bring its descendants, discovered on nearby islands, back to Floreana. But there is a problem: Rats, which came with the settlers and eat tortoise eggs and babies, run rampant there. If you could help bring back the tortoise by poisoning all of the island’s rats, would you do it?

Apr 3, 2023 | thenewatlantis.com | Martha C. Nussbaum |Clare Coffey |Samuel Matlack |Peter Augustine Lawler

In “Bisclavret,” a twelfth-century narrative poem by Marie de France, the moment in which the unwilling werewolf is recognized as a disguised human is one of wonderment mingled with fear. The wolf, with his sudden, feudal, vividly human actions, is no longer neatly categorizable: He is at once beast and quarry, vassal and supplicant.