‘Insouciant Pagan Journal’
The brief but daring life of The Little Review, founded by Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, was an initiation of American letters into the twentieth-century avant-garde.
The brief but daring life of The Little Review, founded by Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, was an initiation of American letters into the twentieth-century avant-garde.
Free trade once aligned with America’s economic and security interests, but in recent years experts have suggested pulling back from globalism and rebuilding the domestic economy.
In Soldiers and Kings, Jason De León uses the anthropological method of "deep hanging out" to offer a complicated portrait of migrant smugglers.
Iris Murdoch's readers return to her to understand the relationship between high intelligence, erotic extremism, and moral virtue.
It is a sad feature of the ego that it will always seek pleasure in the wrong places. Now and again, voters will crave the approval and the leniency of the thing which despises them, and that is how a felonious bigot gets to be president. To millions of decent people who might judge better […]
Sam Barlow’s video games may be the first efforts at interactive cinema—by either a game designer or a filmmaker—that work.
Donald Trump has spent nearly a decade discombobulating people who are paid to think about politics. His appeal has been consistently underestimated. It has also been, just as consistently, overcomplicated. The substance of his style is simple: a gleeful hostility toward the institutions that have traditionally organized American life. He positions himself not merely as […]
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, friends asked me whether I was worried for my four-year-old daughter’s future, specifically her access to legal abortion. My answer: not in California, and not with an abortion provider for a mom. In the worst-case scenario, I joked, I could perform her abortion in my […]
Since about the beginning of the present century, authoritarianism has been on the rise the world over. In China, Xi Jinping has positioned himself as the country’s ruler for life, ending what had been a halting, fitful movement toward the rule of law; in Russia, Vladimir Putin has consolidated absolute power and tried to destroy […]
In the days since the election, I’ve found myself revisiting an essay on the journalist’s role in a free society by the Reverend Levi Jenkins Coppin, editor of the AME Church Review, included in Irvine Garland Penn’s influential 1891 volume The Afro-American Press and Its Editors. “The journalist is the people’s attorney,” Coppin wrote, at […]
One emerging consensus in these post-election days is that woke ideology has lost. Harris ran an impressively unwoke campaign. But as James Carville said, “we couldn’t get the stench off” the woke messages transmitted by, among others, the old white man in the White House. It’s less clear who, or what, has won. Understanding this […]
I feel we’ve been circling the drain for months and now are being rinsed down the plughole. Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’m nauseous and have difficulty breathing. If I looked in the mirror—which I do often these days, purely as a function of disbelief, because I feel I no longer exist—I fancy I would […]
Donald Trump’s election places a new burden on a Supreme Court already operating under a harsh public spotlight. This is a Court, after all, that in recent months has rejected a constitutional challenge to Trump’s ballot eligibility and granted him a stunning measure of immunity from criminal prosecution. Going forward, the justices—including but not limited […]
When did our first linguistic ancestor emerge, and how did the transition from a nonlinguistic to a linguistic state take place?
Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test seems to be about a temporary loss of hearing but is actually one woman’s rehearsal for the losses that come, unbidden, for us all.
The Supreme Court will rule this term on whether a Tennessee law denying minors treatment for gender dysphoria discriminates on the basis of sex.
For Shakespeare’s characters the possibility of a second chance could be their undoing or their salvation. For the playwright, his words gave him many lives.
H.H. Richardson invented a practical, adaptable style for American civic architecture that was used for decades after his death.
A century after Upton Sinclair exposed the inhumane and unhygienic conditions of Chicago’s stockyards, life for animals in America's factory farms and slaughterhouses is still gruesome.
Two recent books by poets embrace lyrical, subjective criticism to breach the porous border between verse and prose.
After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight.
North Atlantic wind tries to tear the roof off the hill, throws all the sea’s abrasives at it, but the tuckamore grew up in this house, body shaped by the timeless occupation of a back bent low, hands in the dirt, working at the fasteners. It’s hard to think of anything more modestly and completely […]
Meticulously installed domestic spaces set the tone for Mickalene Thomas's current exhibition, which features the work for which she is best known: sumptuous portraits of Black women in repose—the artist’s mother, lovers, and friends.
In Look Away, Jacob Kushner draws a disturbing portrait of the white supremacist subculture that took hold across eastern Germany in the 1990s and now is making gains at the ballot box.
Richard Powers's Playground does for oceans what his 2018 novel The Overstory did for trees: it implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human.