Myanmar’s Other Government

Popular resistance to the military junta that seized control in February’s coup has gone far beyond protest and strikes. A remarkable democratic endeavor in dual power is afoot.

June 7, 2021

‘Democracy Is at Stake’

The expert elections lawyer knocked down scores of pro-Trump lawsuits challenging the 2020 results. Now, he says, we’re in a struggle to save the republic.

June 1, 2021

‘Undine’ Retold

With its haunting indifference to logic, German director Christian Petzold’s version of the myth is a study of the ways in which men and women misunderstand one another.

May 30, 2021

Cummings’s Last Stand

The political adviser who helped Boris Johnson ride the Brexit wave into power has turned on him over the government’s pandemic record. But whose nemesis will it prove?

May 25, 2021

On a Quest to Know Everything

“We’re living through a moment when the inhuman scale and complexity of the world has been made visible to us, and we are reacting in human ways. Paranoia is understandable, even logical.”

June 12, 2021

A Proclivity for the Unknown

“I was always attracted by the cosmos—the night sky and the deep, dark mysteries it held have always seduced me.”

June 5, 2021

The True Cost of Living

“Gross inequity begets precarity and suffering, which begets fear, shame, and frustration.”

May 29, 2021

The Truth About Tiananmen

“The man who tells the truth about what really happened in Beijing will rule China.”

February 8, 2001 issue

The Chinese Amnesia

Under the Chinese Communist policy of “Forgetting History,” about once each decade the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society.

September 27, 1990 issue

Casting a Lifeline

In Ma Jian’s lyrical, unexpectedly humorous novel ‘Beijing Coma,’ the narrator gradually realizes he is in a coma, having been shot in the head during the 1989 demonstration-massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

June 26, 2008 issue

The End of the Chinese Revolution

What Deng Xiaoping failed to comprehend is that Tiananmen Square 1989 was virtually the mirror opposite of the Cultural Revolution.

July 20, 1989 issue

The Tanks and the People

Twenty-five years ago, before the Tiananmen massacre, my father told me: “Son, be good and stay at home, never provoke the Communist Party.” My father knew what he was talking about.

June 3, 2014

China’s Spring

In Tiananmen Square, China had spawned one of the largest and best organized nonviolent political protest movements the world had ever seen.

June 29, 1989 issue

‘June Fourth’ Seventeen Years Later: How I Kept a Promise

Every year on the evening of June 3, I have come back to Tiananmen to linger for a while. My wife, our son, and I join a few good friends to gather at the base of the Martyrs’ Monument and spend some time in reflection.

August 10, 2006 issue

The Chinese Intellectuals and the Revolt

For foreigners who live in Beijing, it was already clear, listening to intellectuals, students, and ordinary citizens, that yet another modern Chinese crisis was looming. But no one anticipated the force and volume of what happened.

June 29, 1989 issue