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For our print subscribers: Deliveries of mail during the holidays from an overwhelmed US Postal Service have been inordinately slow. Our latest issue—the January 14 issue—was mailed on December 28. We know that some subscribers have still not received their issues and we hope and expect the issues to be delivered to everyone soon. Read the January 14 issue here.

Elizabeth Kolbert

Chemical Warfare’s Home Front

Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals that introduce new problems.

February 11, 2021 issue

Richard Kreitner

Secessionist Talk Is Serious

Disunion is hardly a new theme in American politics. In this moment of tumult, it would be unwise to rule out its return.

January 19, 2021

Min Jin Lee

The Imperfect and Sublime ‘Gatsby’

Amid a life of disappointments, Fitzgerald’s novel was a crowning achievement. I turn to it because it gives me the sober wisdom to revise my own American dream.

January 21, 2021

Marc Weitzmann

A Rising Tide of Violence in France

The roots of radicalization in the country’s colonial past.

February 11, 2021 issue

Shennette Garrett-Scott

What Price Wholeness?

A detailed new proposal for reparations for slavery raises three critical questions: How much, exactly, does America owe? Where will the money come from? And who gets paid?

February 11, 2021 issue

Alexandra D. Lahav

Medicine Is Made for Men

In medical research, drug regulation, and product design, the male body is too often considered as the default — which can have dangerous, even fatal, consequences for women.

February 11, 2021 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

Chronicle of a Death Ignored

Becky Cooper’s We Keep the Dead Close is as much a study of corrosive institutional patriarchy as it is an investigation into an unsolved 1969 murder at Harvard.

February 11, 2021 issue

Michael Eric Dyson

St. Paul’s Letter to America

“After the Capitol offense, all thoughts of American exceptionalism should be dead,” says the apostle. “But you need not despair.”

January 18, 2021

Mark Danner

‘Be Ready to Fight’

Trumpism is driven by cruelty and domination even as its rhetoric claims grievance and victimization. The attack on the Capitol showed that Donald Trump’s army of millions will not just melt away when he leaves office.

February 11, 2021 issue

Perry Link

Seeing the CCP Clearly

For Chinese dissidents, the end of Washington’s deference to Beijing has been a long time coming.

February 11, 2021 issue

St. Mary of the Assumption Elementary School, Brookline, Massachusetts; composite photograph by James Mollison from his book Playground, published by Aperture in 2015

“How did ‘school choice’ develop into a national movement that has brought public funding to privately managed and religious schools in most states?”

— Diane Ravitch: The War on Public Schools

February 11, 2021

Current Issue

The Latest

Sarah Churchwell

Lincoln’s Warning Against Mobocracy

“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law,” declared the man who would be America’s sixteenth president. Only justice can make a more perfect Union.

January 15, 2021

Peter Lowe

A World Without Us: Josef Koudelka’s ‘Ruins’

These photographs of ancient sites, taken around the Mediterranean between 1991 and 2015, are particularly apt in our time of isolation and upheaval.

January 16, 2021

Lavender Au

China’s Big #MeToo Test

When the people’s republic claims to have achieved gender equality, how to deal with a high-profile accusation of sexual harassment is a tricky matter.

January 12, 2021

Ankush Khardori

Wanted: Lead Suspect in Election Fraud Conspiracy

Once Trump leaves office, he loses immunity. After his attempted coup, let’s not award him impunity instead.

January 6, 2021

Inaugurating a President

First Lady Melania Trump, President Donald Trump, and Vice President Mike Pence, Washington, D.C., January 20, 2017

Masha Gessen

The Styrofoam Presidency

Many hoped Trump’s aesthetics were not a reflection of his entire political self, but merely a style that could be dropped when the occasion demanded it. But when the inauguration came, Trump trampled on some of the most hallowed public rituals of American power.

January 24, 2017

Darryl Pinckney

What He Really Said

President Obama’s first inauguration was the first time black people had come to Washington in great numbers, but not to protest.

February 26, 2009 issue

Darryl Pinckney

Beyond the Fringe

At George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, the National Mall was cordoned off by chainlink fencing for the first time ever. Such stringent measures may have been inconsistent with America’s ideals, but not, apparently, with its laws.

February 22, 2001 issue