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Darryl Pinckney

A Gift for the Long Game

Obama’s memoir of his first term is a story of aiming high and settling for what he could get.

March 25, 2021 issue

Maeve Higgins

Biden and the Border Security-Industrial Complex

Successive administrations have poured money into the business of militarizing immigration control—and lobbyists have returned the favors. Will this president stop the juggernaut?

March 2, 2021

Regina Marler

The Emergency Everywhere

In Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea and Maxim Loskutoff’s Ruthie Fear, young women navigate danger from men and from themselves, against a backdrop of relentless climate catastrophe.

March 25, 2021 issue

Marina Warner

Splash

Fantastic beliefs, in the form of false claims and urban legends, have been traveling irresistibly since the eighteenth century. The effect today has been amplified by social media; mermaid sightings rank in popularity alongside those of aliens, angels, and unicorns.

March 25, 2021 issue

Lydia Wilson

Sudden Monsters

Dima Wannous’s fiction asks where the boundaries lie between individual and collective fears in Syria, a country traumatized by violence.

March 25, 2021 issue

Fintan O’Toole

To Hell with Unity

Biden’s ability to govern depends on abandoning any hope of reconciliation with the GOP.

March 25, 2021 issue

Vivian Gornick

Sex, Noir & Isolation

In his novels, Alfred Hayes explored what he saw as noir’s central concern: the inability to feel the reality of your own life, or anyone else’s.

March 25, 2021 issue

Tash Aw

To Forget and Survive

Is it possible to excavate trauma, Asako Serizawa’s interlinked stories ask, if the people and countries concerned prefer their pain to remain buried?

March 25, 2021 issue

Andrew Martin

Deeper into the Labyrinth

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous books expand our sense of his novels and stories as a living system, as illogical and abrupt as the world we inhabit.

March 25, 2021 issue

Dan Chiasson

This Ain’t No Disco

Talking Heads were at once a party band and an art project.

March 25, 2021 issue

Tove Ditlevsen, 1972

“Memoirs and autobiographies have their own, very individual purposes, but however complex and mysterious the author’s motives, they reveal things no other sort of account can—while foreclosing alternative views.”

— Deborah Eisenberg on Tove Ditlevsen

March 25, 2021

Current Issue

The Latest

Nicole Rudick

The Art of Bea Nettles

A recent show and monograph bring into focus fifty years of her genre-defying photographic work, which adds up to an extraordinary visual autobiography.

February 27, 2021

Anjan Sundaram

No Direction Home

My father chose to pursue a better life for our family through migration, without ever settling and putting down roots. Now, that is my inheritance.

February 23, 2021

Molly Jong-Fast

What the FBI Had on Grandpa

J. Edgar Hoover thought Howard Fast was an un-American menace. To my family, he was just a menace, period. But his file tells a different story.

February 21, 2021

Jacob Kang-Brown and Jack Norton

America’s Hidden Gulag

The nationwide federal detention of immigrants in county jails perpetuates a profit-driven system of mass incarceration.

February 19, 2021

Brief Encounters

Anjan Sundaram, interviewed by Matt Seaton

From Wars Abroad, to Peace at Home

“As I’ve grown older, I’m more aware of the psychological risks we must take,” says the conflict-zone reporter. “Writing about my father represented such a psychological risk.”

February 27, 2021

Anne Enright, interviewed by Willa Glickman

Of Angels, Saints, and Faith in Fiction

“I am interested in metaphor, that is where I get my fix of transcendence,” says the novelist.

February 20, 2021

Coco Fusco, interviewed by Maya Chung

Decolonizing the Museum

“We thought when we began that the performance would be understood as a parody,” says the interdisciplinary artist and writer.

February 6, 2021

Peter Beinart, interviewed by Matt Seaton

A Career in Counter-programming

“Every situation is different, but the forms of injustice rhyme,” says the leading Jewish-American journalist.

January 30, 2021

Our Warming World

Gerhard Richter: Iceberg in Mist, 1982; from ‘Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,’ an exhibition at the Met Breuer. For more on the exhibition, see Susan Tallman’s essay on pages 4–8 of this issue.

Jonathan Mingle

A World Without Ice

The project before us is paradoxical: thinking on long time scales while acting with furious urgency.

May 14, 2020 issue

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, 23rd Street, downtown C train platform, May 9th, 2018

Emily Raboteau

Climate Signs

As much as we may worry about the climate crisis in our kids’ future, it’s already here.

February 1, 2019

A firefighter taking a break from battling the King Fire, Fresh Pond, California, September 2014

William Finnegan

California Burning

Fires are bigger, hotter, faster, more expensive and difficult to fight, and more destructive than ever before. We have entered the era of the megafire.

August 16, 2018 issue

More on Climate Change

Recent Poetry

Katie Peterson

Fog

a poem

March 11, 2021 issue

Paul Franz

Rathlin Island

a poem

February 25, 2021 issue

Laura Kolbe