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Magda Teter

When Poverty Became Profane

Two recent books, by Debra Kaplan and Natan Meir, examine poverty and charity in European Jewish communities, looking at how a marginalized minority dealt with the problems of destitution and social welfare during periods of rapid change.

April 29, 2021 issue

Robert Kuttner

Dividends of a Just Economy

What is keeping the government from acting on behalf of its citizens?

April 29, 2021 issue

Colin Thubron

The Companionship of Nature

Running like a troubled thread through Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights is the tension between a profound human need for the solace of animals and the acknowledgment, even the insistence, that they are creatures apart.

April 29, 2021 issue

Helen Epstein

Steeltown in the Rearview

The images Stephen Shore took in 1977 of scenes from the Rust Belt captured the start of a slow-rolling social catastrophe.

April 19, 2021

Erica Armstrong Dunbar

A Praise House of Many Mansions

In a book and documentary series, Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers a wide-ranging tour of Black religion in America.

April 29, 2021 issue

Natalie de Souza

Editing Humanity’s Future

With CRISPR, our species can turn its inexorable will to control nature back onto itself. Eventually, we could guide human evolution. Does this mean that we should?

April 29, 2021 issue

Sean Wilentz

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography captures the cultural jumble of great literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the self-making of the foremost self-made American.

April 29, 2021 issue

James Gleick

Eclipsed by Fame

There’s a scientific story to tell about Stephen Hawking, but most of his later life served to conceal it.

April 29, 2021 issue

Sophie Pinkham

No More Mother-Saviors

Recent collections of poetry by Russian women offer a glimpse of how perceptions of feminism are changing in post-communist Slavic countries.

April 29, 2021 issue

Daniel Mendelsohn

Words and Other Violence

Much of the force of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction flows from the contrast between the glacial detachment of her tone and the roiling themes of German history that she explores.

April 29, 2021 issue

Malachi Kirby as activist Darcus Howe, on trial with the other members of the Mangrove Nine; from Small Axe: Mangrove

Malachi Kirby (far left) as the activist Darcus Howe, on trial with the other members of the Mangrove Nine; from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe: Mangrove

“The power of Small Axe is that it stands as proposer, seconder, and resounding voice vote for the inclusion of stories, events, and experiences too long absent from the record of British history.”

— Gary Younge: ‘What the Hell Can I Call Myself Except British?’

April 29, 2021

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Yardena Schwartz

Irreconcilable Hebron

The West Bank city has become ground zero of a century-long conflict—not in spite of its sacred history, but because of it.

April 21, 2021

Makenna Goodman

Whose ‘Good Life’?

As back-to-the-land pioneers, Scott and Helen Nearing were gurus of a social movement enjoying renewed interest. But it’s an equivocal legacy.

April 17, 2021

Sheila Heti

Clarice Lispector and Love’s Apprentice

Who are these bizarre creatures, who ask of each other what no two people who are suffering from desire have perhaps ever asked?

April 15, 2021

Tamsin Shaw

Flacking for Facebook

How perfect that a failed Liberal Democrat should be leading the PR effort to persuade us that liberal democracy is safe with the social media giant.

April 13, 2021

Poets on Poets

Marianne Moore

On Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was a consummate refutation of the impression that life must be frantic.

June 25, 1964 issue

Dan Chiasson

Crossing the Invisible Line

The astonishing work of poet Eileen Myles set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match.

March 24, 2016 issue

Charles Simic

The Consolations of Strangeness

Jana Prikryl’s poetry shows a probing intellect alert to the strangeness of our lives, as well as our own estrangement from ourselves.

August 18, 2016 issue

Ange Mlinko

Acts of Extreme Attention

Karen Solie, the consummate poet of the Trans-Canadian Highway, has taken an evolutionary leap with her recent poetry, trading comedy for sublime beauty.

November 21, 2019 issue

John Ashbery

The Book that No One Knows

David Schubert’s poetry is like opening a window in a room that had become stuffy without one’s realizing it.

October 5, 2000 issue

Michael Hofmann

‘A Born Contrarian’

For the subversive, modest, trenchant Bertolt Brecht, a poem is simply the most stringent and economical mode of presenting an argument.

December 20, 2018 issue

Brief Encounters

Sheila Heti, interviewed by Lucy McKeon

Asking the Right Questions

“I am interested in how much freedom a person can have—this freedom leading them to something that only they can do.”

April 17, 2021

Howard W. French, interviewed by Pooka Paik and Lyndon Thompson

A Dispatch from Our Correspondent

“The US must learn to discover the sense of purpose that comes from achieving things of virtue, things that have an objective social need.”

April 10, 2021

David Cole, interviewed by Matt Seaton

Armed with Arguments

“Today, the NRA is on the defensive, and the gun control movement is stronger. That political fight will more likely determine gun regulation than the Supreme Court.”

April 3, 2021

Namwali Serpell, interviewed by Lucy McKeon

The Ecstatic Internet

“Many of us have found a contingent online community of funny, smart black people from across the diaspora, one that isn’t necessarily available to us IRL.”

March 27, 2021