Dismantling the ‘Citadels of Pride’

After long witness of the way sexual harassment creates an “atmosphere of indignity,” the feminist philosopher sees the solution in the law, strong rules, due process—and tenure.

June 30, 2021

Southern Baptists’ Losing Faith

Hardliners want to take over the convention and impose their ultra-conservative values—but they’re fighting over a shrinking franchise. Prosperity gospel megachurches are winning market share.

June 25, 2021

My History with Needles

By strange alchemy, a treatment for allergies also cured my aversion to literature. It was those jabs that made me a writer.

June 23, 2021

Bob Dylan, Historian

Across the six decades of his career, the singer-songwriter has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.

June 19, 2021

The Prophetic Character of Russian Literature

“Pasternak remarked that ‘a book is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience—and nothing else!’ Russian writers asked ultimate questions under extreme conditions.”

June 26, 2021

Beyond Digital Feminism

“When I was a young blogger, stories about motherhood and reproductive rights were often relegated to the style section. Feminist bloggers reshaped mainstream media.”

June 19, 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

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

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

‘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