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Julian Bell

An Impulse Felt Round the World

A recent show and catalog on Surrealism proposes that the thoughts expressed in André Breton’s 1924 manifesto were latent in disparate urban centers, only awaiting his coining of a movement identity.

May 26, 2022 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Schemes Gone Awry

Richard Wilbur’s translations of Molière, now in the Library of America, have a fluency that goes beyond meter and rhyme to encompass textures of speech and movements of thought.

May 26, 2022 issue

Brenda Wineapple

A Fable of Agency

Kristen Green’s The Devil’s Half Acre recounts the story of a fugitive slave jail, and the enslaved woman, Mary Lumpkin, who came to own it.

May 26, 2022 issue

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Shadows Across the Decades

Francisco Goldman’s latest novel is a book about and by a writer journeying across space but also back in time, at least in his mind, to the places that made him.

May 26, 2022 issue

Laura Miller

Under Their Skin

Extraterrestrial living “objects” in Olga Ravn’s The Employees bring an early end to a mysterious mission in outer space.

May 26, 2022 issue

The End of ‘Roe’?

Elizabeth A. Reese

Unsteady Ground

Native people have known for a long time that in this country, rights—whether to remain, to pray, to vote, or even to live—are impermanent and fickle things, subject to revision by those in power.

May 14, 2022

Catherine Coleman Flowers

Our Lives in Their Hands

If state governments truly cared about the lives of poor women or our children, they wouldn’t poison our water and pollute our air. They can’t be trusted with our bodies.

May 13, 2022

Sherrilyn Ifill

Stealing the Crown Jewels

Justice Alito purports to place the future of abortion in the hands of women voters—despite abetting the disenfranchisement of Black and Latina women.

May 12, 2022

Sue Halpern

Before the Fall

As evangelicals came into the GOP tent, Republican voters and politicians traded women’s bodies for political power.

May 11, 2022

E. Tammy Kim

A Permanent Battle

A new history draws on recently declassified archives to illustrate how the Korean War was an intimate civil conflict, not just a proxy battle between superpowers.

May 26, 2022 issue

Cass R. Sunstein

Who Should Regulate?

The question of whether federal agencies or the courts should have the right to interpret legislation may seem technical, but it significantly affects the power of the government.

May 26, 2022 issue

Tim Judah

The Russian Terror

As Russian forces have retreated from some parts of Ukraine, more and more evidence has emerged of summary executions, looting, and destruction.

May 26, 2022 issue

Susie Linfield

How Do Whispers Become Movements?

A new history of conversation focuses not on the revolutionary moment but on the antecedents of transformative political change.

May 26, 2022 issue

Ruth Franklin

Beyond the Betrayal

Why are we so eager to assign a single person blame for revealing the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family?

May 26, 2022 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Our Hypocrisy on War Crimes

The US’s history of moral evasiveness around wartime atrocities undermines the very institution that might eventually bring Putin and his subordinates to justice: the International Criminal Court.

May 26, 2022 issue

Helen Epstein

The Iron Grip of the CFA Franc

The colonial-era currency limits the economic freedom of the African countries that use it and subjects them to continued French authority.

May 26, 2022 issue

“The dikes and polders of the Netherlands shape the lives and habits of all those birds living today, no matter the migration routes embedded in their neural circuits. In the same way, the learning of new languages shapes our human experience even as the traces of our childhood language persist.”

— Gavin Francis: The Babel Within

May 26, 2022

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Jeet Heer

The Racing Brain of Martin Vaughn-James

In the 1970s Canadian comics scene, The Projector made dizzying leaps in the development of the graphic novel form.

April 29, 2022

Walker Mimms

At Saul Steinberg’s Table

The artist known for his playful, philosophical drawings also had a rich practice in sculpture, fashioning everyday objects in wood and paint.

April 27, 2022

Sarah Jaffe

The Great Ungrieving

A million Americans have died from Covid-19. Yet the national task of mourning them has been outsourced and privatized, as the US goes on with business as usual.

April 22, 2022

New Poems

Dan Chiasson

The Forest of Crickets

May 26, 2022 issue

Elisa Gabbert

In Nature

May 12, 2022 issue

Camille Ralphs

After George Herbert

May 26, 2022 issue

Free from the Archives

Ronald Dworkin: The Strange Case of Judge Alito

“The current ground rules guarantee not that judges will keep their own counsel on constitutional matters until they are on the Court, but that the President and the politicians he is most anxious to please will know his views while the nation does not.”

Brief Encounters

Carolina A. Miranda, interviewed by Daniel Drake

Art of Place

“As art fairs have come to dominate the arts calendar, art feels increasingly placeless, something that parachutes in and just as quickly disappears.”

May 7, 2022

Christopher Benfey, interviewed by Andrew Katzenstein

Provocation from Another Soul

“Stanley Cavell was a dazzling teacher. You felt that he was opening his private studio to you, showing you how philosophy gets done rather than simply reporting his findings after the fact.”

April 30, 2022

Carson Ellis, interviewed by Leanne Shapton

Nature Doing Its Thing

“I’ve always been drawn to the microcosmic worlds of bugs and tiny creatures; the scenes you discover when you turn over a log or look into a tide pool.”

April 23, 2022