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Jenny Uglow

The Reader of Rocks

William Smith’s innovative use of the fossil record helped him create the first detailed geological map of England, Wales, and Scotland.

March 11, 2021 issue

Jessica Riskin

When Engineers Were Humanists

During the Renaissance, mechanical inventions served as a medium for experimental thinking about all aspects of the cosmos.

March 11, 2021 issue

Anne Enright

Spirited Away

What is the spark that makes a shared God not just real, but so present he talks back to you?

March 11, 2021 issue

Anjan Sundaram

No Direction Home

My father chose to pursue a better life for our family through migration, without ever settling and putting down roots. Now, that is my inheritance.

February 23, 2021

Molly Jong-Fast

What the FBI Had on Grandpa

J. Edgar Hoover thought Howard Fast was an un-American menace. To my family, he was just a menace, period. But his file tells a different story.

February 21, 2021

Gregory Hays

Tune Out & Lean In

The recent revival of Stoic philosophy has stayed surprisingly true to its ancient roots while gaining popularity among executives and tech-bros.

March 11, 2021 issue

Helen Epstein

The Truth About Museveni’s Crimes

Despite Western claims that he brought peace to Uganda after years of violence under his predecessors, his regime has been bloody from the start.

March 11, 2021 issue

Larry Wolff

Phantasms of the Opera

The invention of gas illumination offered operagoers in the mid-nineteenth century “a completely new experience of light” that reshaped operatic composition and performance

March 11, 2021 issue

Peter C. Baker

The Bloodhound

A distinct thread of anger runs through all of Nicholson Baker’s work: anger at what people with power get up to in the shadows, anger at how they lie about it, anger at how we forget.

March 11, 2021 issue

Tim Parks

Characters in Search of a Conflict

The life of the Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello, like those of his characters, oscillated between pathos and beffa: ironic, unexpected, crushing reversal.

March 11, 2021 issue

Martin Luther King Jr.; portrait by Robert Vickrey, 1963

“If democratic citizenship is to be free and equal, it must uproot habits, power arrangements, and resource distributions that leave us subject to the arbitrary impositions of others in the most vital domains of life.”

— Brandon M. Terry: What Dignity Demands

March 11, 2021

Current Issue

The Latest

Molly Jong-Fast

What the FBI Had on Grandpa

J. Edgar Hoover thought Howard Fast was an un-American menace. To my family, he was just a menace, period. But his file tells a different story.

February 21, 2021

Jacob Kang-Brown and Jack Norton

America’s Hidden Gulag

The nationwide federal detention of immigrants in county jails perpetuates a profit-driven system of mass incarceration.

February 19, 2021

J. Hoberman

The ‘Lost World’ of Vittorio De Seta

These luminous shorts depicting the hardscrabble lives of fishermen, shepherds, peasants, and miners in rural Italy turn documentary into art film.

February 14, 2021

Frederic Wehrey

The Lost Rivers of Owens Valley

Water—who owns it, who uses it—has shaped this landscape from the Paiutes’ irrigation canals to the Los Angeles aqueduct. And it is a history in which my own family played a part.

February 16, 2021

Brief Encounters

Anne Enright, interviewed by Willa Glickman

Of Angels, Saints, and Faith in Fiction

“I am interested in metaphor, that is where I get my fix of transcendence,” says the novelist.

February 20, 2021

Coco Fusco, interviewed by Maya Chung

Decolonizing the Museum

“We thought when we began that the performance would be understood as a parody,” says the interdisciplinary artist and writer.

February 6, 2021

Peter Beinart, interviewed by Matt Seaton

A Career in Counter-programming

“Every situation is different, but the forms of injustice rhyme,” says the leading Jewish-American journalist.

January 30, 2021

Jonathan Stevenson, interviewed by Matt Seaton

The National Security Counselor

“Entrenched constraints would have been damn useful in preventing Trump from heedlessly tearing down the US-led postwar liberal order.”

January 16, 2021

Our Warming World

Gerhard Richter: Iceberg in Mist, 1982; from ‘Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,’ an exhibition at the Met Breuer. For more on the exhibition, see Susan Tallman’s essay on pages 4–8 of this issue.

Jonathan Mingle

A World Without Ice

The project before us is paradoxical: thinking on long time scales while acting with furious urgency.

May 14, 2020 issue

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, 23rd Street, downtown C train platform, May 9th, 2018

Emily Raboteau

Climate Signs

As much as we may worry about the climate crisis in our kids’ future, it’s already here.

February 1, 2019

A firefighter taking a break from battling the King Fire, Fresh Pond, California, September 2014

William Finnegan

California Burning

Fires are bigger, hotter, faster, more expensive and difficult to fight, and more destructive than ever before. We have entered the era of the megafire.

August 16, 2018 issue

More on Climate Change

Recent Poetry

Katie Peterson

Fog

a poem

March 11, 2021 issue

Paul Franz

Rathlin Island

a poem

February 25, 2021 issue

Laura Kolbe