Sudan’s Repressed Democracy

The fighting in Khartoum, now in its third month, is the latest disaster for a democracy movement that has long resisted Sudan’s ruling regimes.

July 18, 2023

Down to the Wire

The Venezuelan artist Gego worked in many mediums, but she achieved her most expansive effects in sculpture. 

July 16, 2023

The Spanish Exceptions

Spain’s upcoming snap elections may be decided by the country’s unpredictable separatist parties.

July 16, 2023

The Jargonauts

In their films and writings, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen made a political project out of studying meanings and signs. 

July 15, 2023

A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”

June 25, 2023

DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

March 22, 2023

The Human Costs of AI

Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware.

October 21, 2021 issue

How Smart Are Computers?

“Artificial Intelligence has gone through a sober process of realizing that human beings are cleverer than it supposed. It has turned to a more cautious and diversified strategy of accumulating ‘know-how’ rather than mounting frontal assaults.”

November 15, 1973 issue

First Among Equals

“Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. In the foreground, white and red paint—conjuring threads escaping from the woman’s sewing cushion—appears as if dribbled on the canvas.”

February 7, 2019 issue

The Mysterious Women of Vermeer

Vermeer has a mind-boggling technique for transferring visual sensations from eye to canvas as if without the hand’s intervention. Color has somehow wafted down, as leaves might on water, and cohered automatically into threads and ringlets and cushions.

December 22, 2011 issue

Camera Work

“To read about Johannes Vermeer and to look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There’s an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself.”

May 31, 2001 issue

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

In Sorrow’s Kitchen

“Hurston exhibited a strong inclination toward the iconoclastic, but the shifts in her opinions and the elusiveness of her personality sometimes make it hard to see her for what she was, a black woman ahead of her historical moment.”

December 21, 1978 issue

The Blues

“The tremendous burden of sociology which LeRoi Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give even the blues the blues.”

February 6, 1964 issue

Ghost Story

“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure of our national literature. She has written a work that brings to the darkest corners of American experience the wisdom, and the courage, to know them as they are.”

November 5, 1987 issue

The Haiku of Confinement

“Wright feverishly wrote some 4,000 haiku, from which he selected 817 as worthy of publication. Julia Wright chose one of the poems, a metaphorical self-portrait, as Wright’s epitaph: ‘Burning out its time, / And timing its own burning, / One lonely candle.’”

June 25, 2020

Clinton Agonistes

The Clinton impeachment was a situation in which a handful of people with something to gain (a book contract, a sinecure as a network “analyst,” or the justification of a failure to get either of the Clintons on Whitewater), managed to harness this phenomenon and ride it.

October 22, 1998 issue

Reagan’s Junta

“The implications of government by secret presidential junta strike at the very roots of the American system of government. One way to think about them is to note how the Iran-contra affair has been defended or rationalized by those politically or ideologically closest to the President.”

January 29, 1987 issue

A Special Supplement: Impeachment

There are two reasons for impeaching Richard Nixon. One is that this may be the only legal proceeding to determine the President’s complicity in the Watergate scandal. The other is that only so grave a step may deter a future President from such abuses.

June 28, 1973 issue

He Was No Moses

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

December 16, 2021 issue

Unheard Melodies

“I think narrative is underused in poetry, but I also think I understand why it’s underused—it became exhausted.”

July 22, 2023

A Ghibli Girlhood

“Learning the conditions under which a beloved childhood movie was made can be a loss of innocence, but in the case of Miyazaki, that’s exactly what the films are about.”

July 15, 2023

The Human Landscape

“I try to avoid divisive political or activist narratives that condescend to underserved people. What if we immerse readers in slowness rather than the spectacle of disaster?”

July 8, 2023