The Supreme Court Picks Its Battles

June ended with far-reaching upsets for civil rights, but a closer look at the Supreme Court’s decisions across the 2022–2023 term suggests the justices are not immune to public scrutiny.

July 4, 2023

Poet of Shubert Alley

The late Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick, in Fiddler on the Roof and above all She Loves Me, gave the musical comedy a rare insight, poetic delicacy, and emotional intimacy. 

June 30, 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

Queens of the Screen

For a decade starting in the early 1960s, a private Los Angeles society called the Gay Girls Riding Club made delirious, elaborate drag parodies of Hollywood films. 

June 25, 2023

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

Working in Their Sleep

Meatpacking workers in Arkansas, grieving loved ones lost to Covid and struggling to pay medical bills, are organizing for justice from their employer.

December 23, 2022

What Apps Mean for Food Delivery Workers

Food delivery is nothing new. But in the online delivery industry, startups, flush with venture capital, have both altered and entrenched this historically exploitative low-wage work.

September 20, 2019

Why Work Is More and More Debased

“New technologies created new ways ‘of designing and monitoring the work of other parties,’ making it easier to outsource work while retaining and even intensifying control over worker performance.”

October 23, 2014 issue

The Golden Arm

“If we pretend that this transformation will automatically create new jobs for the men and women it displaces, we will probably end up with a vastly expanded underclass, not a vastly expanded pool of computer programmers.”

October 24, 1985 issue

‘A Magical Medium’

“What I am chasing is a reading experience that isn’t just educational but unmoors me a bit.”

July 1, 2023

Who Swims with the Scientist?

“I learned how to duct-tape my feet and walk through blackwater swamps in sandals and shorts, a vastly helpful form of literary qualification.”

June 24, 2023

Subjects and Concords

“One of the intellectual quirks of professional historians might be that we find pretty much everything interesting and can appreciate why it would be exciting to study.”

June 17, 2023