Introducing Double Take, our new blog from the archives. Check back over the next few days to see some of our favorite pieces from the magazine’s eighty-seven year history. Here, we take stock of a few groundbreaking investigative pieces that have significantly influenced the national discourse over the past century.

Two of these, “Hiroshima” and “Silent Spring,” are pieces that, when they were published, produced noticeable changes in the public’s thinking on the issues of nuclear war and the environment. Another, “Survival,” helped introduce the country to the man who would later become its thirty-fifth president.