Syrians Die in Western Media Darkness

When the world stopped paying attention to Syria’s civil war and its refugees, it wasn’t just the regime that welcomed impunity. A European government took the invitation, too.

July 20, 2021

The Magnificence of the Medicis

To the Florentine dynasts, art patronage was power expressed in pigment, but as a new show at the Met highlights, it left a legacy of incalculable value.

July 17, 2021

Merrick Garland’s Moderation to Excess

As attorney general, he is the United States’ top law enforcement officer. But is he enforcing enough?

July 15, 2021

When I Lived in French

I loved the language and found a home within it. But France itself, that was a less hospitable place to me.

July 12, 2021

Found in Translation

“For me, there’s my life before I learned French and my life after. Akira Mizubayashi writes that he was born in French at the age of nineteen. I feel similarly.”

July 24, 2021

Dredging Up the Ever-Living Past

“History itself is a form of storytelling. We learn about the human condition, about decency, about love, about cruelty, about all manner of matters.”

July 17, 2021

Ramblin’ Man

“I’m fascinated by the notion of storytelling as wayfinding. The compact between narrative and walking is ancient—every path tells.”

July 10, 2021

Tea with Okakura

For Kakuzo Okakura, Japanese art was a vital national tradition, where roots needed cultivating in order to keep the living tree healthy.

May 25, 2000 issue

Embers of Guilt

Why, if Christianity and Japanese culture are so hopelessly at odds, did Shusaku Endo devote a very active career to exploring the hopelessness of it all?

February 19, 1981 issue

‘Fukushima Devil Fish’: A Nuclear Pastoral

That the nuclear disasters ushered in a new era in Japanese culture is widely recognized. That they also inspired a reappraisal of what had been made in the past is only partially so.

August 18, 2018

Delicate Paintings of Edo Japan

“Painting Edo,” the ambitious jewel of an exhibition currently on view for no one at the Harvard Art Museum, is perhaps arguably experiencing its most historically authentic moment in the strangeness of ours.

May 9, 2020

Writer, Rightist or Freak?

Yukio Mishima was a great craftsman of Japanese prose, and deep down seemed to be a sensitive and vulnerable man, but his obsessions with provocation and his inability to tolerate boredom drove him to extraordinary aggressiveness.

December 11, 1975 issue

Cult of the Sword

Administrators, poets, sages, and warriors: for three centuries, the samurai class in Japan maintained its military spirit during times of peace and preserved its traditions of art and philosophy during times of strife.

October 11, 1979 issue

Kurosawa’s Japan Revisited

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru may have looked a bit more broad and didactic than I remembered. But since I moved to Japan, the film somehow still touches on a world that grows deeper within me every autumn.

December 30, 2015

Japan: Prose of Departure

last flickering shift / of flame flutters off. The log’s / charred forked shape is left. A travelogue; or mourning a friend from afar.

December 18, 1986 issue

A Second Chance

A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained. Witnesses, like stage actors, have to play to that audience if their performances are to be convincing.

September 24, 2020 issue

Good Pictures

If the threat of taking boring pix hangs over every photographer of ambition, Diane Arbus was perhaps more conscious of it than any other photographer. 

January 15, 2004 issue

The Master Writer of the City

Joseph Mitchell’s notorious nonfiction inventions revealed a hybrid genre for which he had a singular genius.

April 23, 2015 issue

The Trial of Alyosha

In Václav Havel’s letters, the strictures of censorship elicited from him a strange, unclassifiable, inadvertent masterpiece.

June 14, 1990 issue

‘I Wanted to Paint What I Know’: An Interview with Jordan Casteel

Casteel’s first solo exhibition in New York City, ‘Within Reach,’ is a collection of large-scale oil portraits, on view at the New Museum for just one more week.

December 26, 2020

An Interview with Archie Shepp

My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, was a revolutionary, both musically and politically.

September 29, 2020

‘This Planet is Our Spaceship’: An Interview with Cauleen Smith

“Art at its best gives much and demands little in return. Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we applied that ethic to every other aspect of life?”

November 28, 2020