Syrians Die in Western Media Darkness

When the world stopped paying attention to Syria’s civil war and its refugees, it wasn’t just the regime that welcomed impunity. A European government took the invitation, too.

July 20, 2021

The Magnificence of the Medicis

To the Florentine dynasts, art patronage was power expressed in pigment, but as a new show at the Met highlights, it left a legacy of incalculable value.

July 17, 2021

Merrick Garland’s Moderation to Excess

As attorney general, he is the United States’ top law enforcement officer. But is he enforcing enough?

July 15, 2021

When I Lived in French

I loved the language and found a home within it. But France itself, that was a less hospitable place to me.

July 12, 2021

Dredging Up the Ever-Living Past

“History itself is a form of storytelling. We learn about the human condition, about decency, about love, about cruelty, about all manner of matters.”

July 17, 2021

Ramblin’ Man

“I’m fascinated by the notion of storytelling as wayfinding. The compact between narrative and walking is ancient—every path tells.”

July 10, 2021

Oh, Mood of Alabama

“Most of the red states should probably be purple states but some combination of voter suppression, under-resourcing, and gerrymandering prevents that.”

July 3, 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