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

It Happened in Milwaukee

For the feminist academic Jane Gallop, policies that forbid consensual sex and romance between professors and students are a threat to pedagogy.

October 23, 1997 issue

Comedy Central on the Mall

Jon Stewart confirmed that we had all come to the rally in Washington in order to congratulate ourselves on our decency and rationality. We were at a giant preen-in.

December 9, 2010 issue

Wolfe in Wolfe’s Clothing

Wolfe, cynically dismissing the ideology of the twentieth-century modernists as a pose, writes about modern architecture as if it were something that had been put on earth simply to irk him, with no social and cultural history. 

December 17, 1981 issue

Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography

Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection.

April 29, 2010 issue

Brazil’s Fotoclubistas in Focus

A show at MoMA showcases the Modernist heyday of a vibrant, largely amateur avant-garde photography movement.

June 11, 2021

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

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

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

The True Cost of Living

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

May 29, 2021

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

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

Naples, Florida

a poem

November 5, 2020 issue

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

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

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

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

‘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

Buzz Buzz Buzz

Humans have spent decades trying to teach other animals our languages, but we’ve made little effort to learn theirs.

August 20, 2020 issue

He Tried to Be a Badger

The more that’s learned about cognition in other species, the tougher it is to make the case that our intelligence is anything special.

June 23, 2016 issue

Tigers, Humans, and Snails

Whether birdsong at dawn or just a weed in a sidewalk, nature is all around us. Yet all too frequently we only appreciate it when it’s out of reach.

February 10, 2011 issue

The Mental Life of Plants and Worms

Do jellyfish have minds?

April 24, 2014 issue