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Alan Hollinghurst

A Snob’s Progress

A new edition of Henry “Chips” Channon’s diaries gives fascinating glimpses of homosocial desire in a hectic narrative of aristocratic and political life.

May 27, 2021 issue

Irina Dumitrescu

Don’t Get Too Comfortable

Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had is a collection of brief essays about how a person navigates the moral dilemmas of ownership and privilege.

May 27, 2021 issue

Adam Shatz

A Blues Surrealist

Julius Hemphill’s music uses stark, lyrical abstraction and svelte dissonances to confront the vicissitudes of black American life.

May 27, 2021 issue

Fintan O’Toole

The King of Little England

Boris Johnson, unlike Trump, does not want never-ending disarray. The difficulty is that, having delivered him a string of political successes, Brexit will not go away.

June 10, 2021 issue

Michael Gorra

Promise Miscarried

Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind is a campus novel equally obsessed with the life of the body and with the precariousness of academic life.

May 27, 2021 issue

Jessica T. Mathews

Losing No Time

In his first hundred days President Biden has been bold, decisive, and willing to take risks in his foreign policy judgments, but his early mistakes on Iran and Taiwan may have dangerous consequences.

May 27, 2021 issue

Alan Rusbridger

Two Centuries of ‘The Guardian’

There have been both lean and comfortable times over the decades, but the paper has held its editorial nerve.

May 27, 2021 issue

Anna Della Subin

The Rules of the Confidence Game

The Book of Charlatans provides an unusual glimpse into the street life of medieval Islamic societies rarely captured in more elevated Arabic literary sources.

May 27, 2021 issue

Michael Kazin

Ending the Kennedy Romance

The first volume of Frederik Logevall’s biography of JFK reveals the scope of his ambition and the weakness of his political commitments.

May 27, 2021 issue

Nathan Thrall

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

March 19, 2021

Teffi on a trip through the South of France, 1929

“The translucent surface of her writing gives sight of the depths of the human spirit: its raging and yearning, its dark nights and joyous awakenings, its wild cries, its anarchic craziness.”

— Rachel Polonsky on the tales of Teffi

May 27, 2021

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Corey Robin

Arendt and Roth: An Uncanny Convergence

Despite very different lives, the two writers not only knew and liked each other, but also found common cause in the great concerns that animated their work.

May 12, 2021

Atul Dev

Modi’s Folly

His citizens are dying in thousands for lack of basic medical care, yet India’s leader is pressing ahead with a self-aggrandizing makeover of New Delhi.

May 10, 2021

Sasha Frere-Jones

The Paranoid Style in Adam Curtis

His films choreograph archive footage, charismatic pop, and portentous commentary in pursuit of a dark, totalizing narrative—all the seduction of conspiracy theory without the substance.

May 8, 2021

Willa Glickman

The Future of Fracking

New technology has allowed access to more oil and gas in the US than ever expected. Will we be able to turn away from this dangerous windfall before it’s too late?

May 5, 2021

Free from the Archives

He Tried to Be a Badger

“It’s obviously a lot easier to justify—and to stomach—humans’ treatment of animals if we imagine them to be in some essential way unlike ourselves,” Elizabeth Kolbert writes in this 2016 review of three books about animal intelligence.

A raccoon on the northeast shore of Whitefish Lake, Michigan, 1903; photograph by George Shiras from In the Heart of the Dark Night, which collects his images of wildlife from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is edited by Sonia Voss, with an essay by Jean-Christophe Bailly, and is published by Éditions Xavier Barral.

Coast to Coast

Elizabeth Hardwick

In Maine

There is about Maine a fascinating softness that seems to spread like a blanket over the hardness of rock and woods and icy turf. Not a tropical softness, but the odd snowy lassitude of isolation.

October 7, 1971 issue

T.H. Breen

The Vigilantes of Vermont

In 1777 Vermonters declared themselves citizens of an independent republic and ratified one of the most liberal, egalitarian constitutions in American history. How did a populist movement led by a violent, charismatic figure give birth to a stable democratic society?

April 5, 2012 issue

Ange Mlinko

Naples, Florida

a poem

November 5, 2020 issue

Diane Johnson

Ah, Wilderness!

Americans’ captivation with wilderness springs from a deep source of anxiety and hope; an abiding belief in valuable myths of independence and personal enterprise that appear to survive in the frontier.

March 23, 1978 issue

Garry Wills

Chicago Underground

While Chicago has long been known as the “City of the Big Shoulders,” what has mattered from the outset is that it has had a brain on those shoulders: a technological and commercial mind and a reforming, even a socially creative, intellect.

October 21, 1993 issue

Annette Gordon-Reed

The Real Texas

People go to Texas seeking fortunes, hoping to find a place somewhere between what is real and what is myth; it is strange and disturbing that this hope resembles the feeling that brought Anglo settlers, along with the people they enslaved, into the region so long ago.

October 24, 2019 issue

Joan Didion

The Golden Land

The overland crossing to California has long had the aspect of a quest, and residents have dwelled upon the place and its meaning since the first remote settlement: What did that voyage ultimately mean?

October 21, 1993 issue

Patrick Vinton Kirch

‘Paradise of the Pacific’

Nineteenth-century Hawai‘i attracted traders, fortune-seeking entrepreneurs, and capitalists, who encountered, and displaced, a flourishing and elaborate culture whose ancestors had sailed from Polynesia in 1000 AD.

December 3, 2015 issue