Inventories of Light

The work of the Chicago painter Miyoko Ito is at once tightly controlled and filled with exuberant love for the medium. 

April 3, 2023

Letter from an English Department on the Brink

At the English department I chair, our major has grown by more than 40 percent in the last two years. We are being driven to the edge of extinction anyway.

April 2, 2023

Macron Unreformed

“Much of the anger about this reform represents other anxieties: increased inequality, the rising cost of living, and a sense that many French people have that if they’re outside of Paris they’re totally cut off.”

April 1, 2023

Love’s Body Count

In HBO’s The Last of Us, violence never implicates the viewer as it did the player.

March 29, 2023

Saboteur in Chief

When you want to discredit government itself, obliviousness and ineptitude are their own rewards.

December 6, 2018 issue

The King and I

Trump cannot function as a dictator, but he thinks and behaves like one. And this contradiction of an authoritarian in a democratic system turns upside down one of the central qualities of dictatorship: the monopoly on predictability.

March 21, 2019 issue

Trump’s Show Trial

Republican senators are now quite openly behaving as courtiers. It is impertinent for courtiers even to go through the motions of putting the monarch on trial.

February 27, 2020 issue

Dress Rehearsal

Trump’s attempt almost two years ago to undermine the 2020 election reads today like a blueprint drawn for a future autocrat.

January 19, 2023 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

What Kind of Country Do We Want?

Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America?

June 11, 2020 issue

‘Our Bodies Were Born into Hard Labor’

Sarah Smarsh’s ‘Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth’

February 21, 2019 issue

Time for a New Deal

“The nation’s businesses have illegally, callously, and systematically abused their workers in a time of increased global competition and technological change, while government protection of workers’ rights has significantly weakened.”

September 25, 2008 issue

Poverty Program

Charles Booth’s monumental Life and Labour of the People in London mapped and documented the extent of poverty in England at the turn of the twentieth century.

January 30, 1969 issue

Making Sense of the Mess

“The banal, the magical, violence, love, they are all part of reality, not just as separate experiences but often different aspects of the same thing.”

April 8, 2023

Macron Unreformed

“Much of the anger about this reform represents other anxieties: increased inequality, the rising cost of living, and a sense that many French people have that if they’re outside of Paris they’re totally cut off.”

April 1, 2023

A Toxic Bottom Line

“Solidarity between the environmental and labor movements would be powerful because it could provide a vision of a future that isn’t based on extraction.”

March 25, 2023