John Berger spent a meaningful portion of his life thinking, with precision and care, about how to look at the world—an effort he detailed in numerous essays and books, among them Ways of Seeing and About Looking. “Reading them, you often feel you’re standing next to him in the museum or even looking through his eyes at a painting or a sculpture,” writes A.O. Scott. “You pay attention to his attention.” Scott, an attentive reader himself, brings Berger’s lifelong project into our famously distractable era; his consideration of Berger is a primer for observation and study, a gentle nudge to focus, lest we lose sight of something essential.

Right now, we’re in the midst of an attention crisis, individually and collectively snared in an infinite scroll of disruption and distraction. Berger saw this crisis coming and foresaw its consequences. In 1978, writing about photography and its impact on the modern world, he argued that the dominance of images “creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: Memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us.” That diagnosis seems even truer today, as the functions of remembering, judging and interpreting are increasingly offloaded from human minds and communities into the ether of social media feeds and artificial intelligence. We’re in danger of forgetting how to look.

Thousands of small, often obsolete dams are blocking fish migrations across the United States. In this piece, Ben Goldfarb explores the growing movement to remove these barriers—despite political, economic, and emotional obstacles. He asks, “Can government agencies and conservation groups pick up the pace of dam removal while fish are still around to benefit?”

The Eastern Seaboard’s most enthusiastic purger of dams has long been Plymouth, Massachusetts, and one weekend I visited during its Herring Festival, a celebration of the resurgent alewife population that annually runs up Town Brook, the stream at Plymouth’s heart. The day was cool and damp, and I followed a posse of dads in Red Sox sweatshirts and kids in rainboots up the path that paralleled the creek. Someone had chalked “LOOK FISH” on the asphalt, and I glanced streamward to find alewives holding in small pods, weaving around each other in their effortless way.