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Clair Wills

The Wages of Virtue

Chastity seems like a simple concept, but a new history proposes that it has always been a shifting and malleable virtue.

November 4, 2021 issue

Declan Ryan

‘I Work and I Remember’

In Lawrence Joseph’s poetry there’s no escape from the memories of his formative, difficult years in Detroit.

November 4, 2021 issue

Michael Massing

The Story the Media Missed in Afghanistan

Belated press coverage of what enabled the Taliban’s return to power as the US withdrew exposed past failures to report the conflict’s effects on Afghans beyond Kabul.

October 20, 2021

Assaf Sharon

‘This Obstinate Little Man’

Tom Segev’s biography of David Ben-Gurion depicts a man who intended to become a Zionist Lenin but ended up “an Israeli King Lear.”

November 4, 2021 issue

Jed Perl

Colors in Conversation

Joan Mitchell was a Romantic whose paintings join nature and feelings with an operatic lyricism.

November 4, 2021 issue

Audrey Wollen

Not to Be

A Matter of Death and Life presents the closing scenes of a long marriage as both an informal diary and an instructive text.

November 4, 2021 issue

Jane Hu

Portrait of the Robot as a Young Woman

From his first novel to his latest, Kazuo Ishiguro has considered what it means to care for and attend to others.

November 4, 2021 issue

Natalie Angier

Claw & Order

What do we owe nature, and how might we do a better job of coexisting with species that do not exist for our pleasure and sustenance?

November 4, 2021 issue

Ian Johnson

Chinese Medicine in the Covid Wards

One doctor’s mission to show that traditional healing arts could help in a national crisis.

November 4, 2021 issue

Bill McKibben

The Future Is Electric

Because electricity is so much more efficient than combustion, totally electrifying our country would cut primary energy use about in half.

November 4, 2021 issue

Elizabeth Strout; illustration by Alain Pilon

“In a series of recent works, whose frequency hints at a tumultuous amount of unshared experience, Elizabeth Strout has written with dazzling acuity about a whole cluster of overlooked lives.”

— Pankaj Mishra: Writing the Other America

November 4, 2021

Current Issue

New Poems

Susan Barba

For the Growers and the Grocers

November 4, 2021 issue

Richie Hofmann

At the Rustic Hamlet Built in 1783 for Marie Antoinette, Last Queen of France

November 4, 2021 issue

Jorie Graham

They Ask Me

October 21, 2021 issue

Jenny Uglow

Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy

How a Venetian masterpiece ended up in the Louvre.

October 21, 2021 issue

Laura Marsh

Are the Kids All Right?

If Jonathan Franzen’s earlier books were steeped in ironic social observation, Crossroads is an experiment in sincerity.

October 21, 2021 issue

Ursula Lindsey

In the Fire

The Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi fearlessly told unpleasant truths about discrimination against women in Arab countries.

October 21, 2021 issue

Sue Halpern

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

The Latest

Fintan O’Toole

Ireland’s Coming of Age and Mine

For a Dublin kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the whole experience was mirrored in the nation’s quest for identity.

October 18, 2021

Yasmine El Rashidi

Pharaonic Ambition in Ferro-Concrete

This makeover of Egypt’s capital is not just heedless of its heritage, but wantonly destructive of old neighborhoods—all in service of a self-aggrandizing nationalist mythology.

October 16, 2021

Adam Shatz

Coltrane’s New ‘Love Supreme’

The studio version has long been recognized as the jazz saxophonist’s masterwork. But a recently unearthed live recording is nothing short of a revelation.

October 7, 2021

Brief Encounters

Raja Shehadeh, interviewed by Matt Seaton

In His Father’s Footsteps

“So I continued to visit Jaffa, but I had to rely more on my imagination because the reality was of an entirely different place from what he had described.”

October 16, 2021

Ben Lerner, interviewed by Jana Prikryl

Unknown Sources of Lift

“I think there’s an understandable but perilous tendency to conflate art and artist when the artist in question uses autobiographical elements in their work.”

October 9, 2021

Gavin Francis, interviewed by Lucy Jakub

Human Diagnostics

“Life in lockdown is not natural for the majority of Homo sapiens. In the ballooning of mental health problems this year, we’ve seen just how deleterious those kinds of restrictions are.”

October 2, 2021