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Roya Hakakian

Unveiling Iran

From the start, the Islamic Revolution used the compulsory hijab to cement its rule by subordinating women. A wave of civil disobedience is challenging all that.

March 8, 2021

Regina Marler

The Emergency Everywhere

In Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea and Maxim Loskutoff’s Ruthie Fear, young women navigate danger from men and from themselves, against a backdrop of relentless climate catastrophe.

March 25, 2021 issue

Vivian Gornick

Sex, Noir & Isolation

In his novels, Alfred Hayes explored what he saw as noir’s central concern: the inability to feel the reality of your own life, or anyone else’s.

March 25, 2021 issue

An-My Lê and Viet Thanh Nguyen

Examining the American War Machine from Inside and Out

The artist and writer discuss their experience as Vietnamese refugees and how it has influenced their work.

March 6, 2021

Deborah Eisenberg

Awful But Joyful

In her autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen asks us neither to condemn nor to forgive—only to look.

March 25, 2021 issue

Lydia Wilson

Sudden Monsters

Dima Wannous’s fiction asks where the boundaries lie between individual and collective fears in Syria, a country traumatized by violence.

March 25, 2021 issue

Marina Warner

Splash

Fantastic beliefs, in the form of false claims and urban legends, have been traveling irresistibly since the eighteenth century. The effect today has been amplified by social media; mermaid sightings rank in popularity alongside those of aliens, angels, and unicorns.

March 25, 2021 issue

Evan Kindley

The People We Know Best

Readers love fictional characters almost as if they were real people. Literary scholars are just starting to take them more seriously.

March 25, 2021 issue

Dan Chiasson

This Ain’t No Disco

Talking Heads were at once a party band and an art project.

March 25, 2021 issue

Fintan O’Toole

To Hell with Unity

Biden’s ability to govern depends on abandoning any hope of reconciliation with the GOP.

March 25, 2021 issue

Bea Nettles: Evenin..., August 1970

“There is a kind of magic in Bea Nettles’s work, as though she isn’t recording reality in her images but creating it.”

— Nicole Rudick: The Art of Bea Nettles

March 25, 2021

Current Issue

The Latest

An-My Lê and Viet Thanh Nguyen

Examining the American War Machine from Inside and Out

The artist and writer discuss their experience as Vietnamese refugees and how it has influenced their work.

March 6, 2021

Michelle Chen

Chinatown’s Long Covid

A younger generation tackles the latest, greatest threat to the historic district’s survival.

March 4, 2021

Maeve Higgins

Biden and the Border Security-Industrial Complex

Successive administrations have poured money into the business of militarizing immigration control—and lobbyists have returned the favors. Will this president stop the juggernaut?

March 2, 2021

Nicole Rudick

The Art of Bea Nettles

A recent show and monograph bring into focus fifty years of her genre-defying photographic work, which adds up to an extraordinary visual autobiography.

February 27, 2021

Brief Encounters

Brandon M. Terry, interviewed by Nawal Arjini

The Two Titans of Civil Rights

“Both men ventured remarkably prophetic judgments about the ways that security state machinations and profligate war-making would prove utterly devastating to American life.”

March 6, 2021

Anjan Sundaram, interviewed by Matt Seaton

From Wars Abroad, to Peace at Home

“As I’ve grown older, I’m more aware of the psychological risks we must take,” says the conflict-zone reporter. “Writing about my father represented such a psychological risk.”

February 27, 2021

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

On Dance

Sonia Delaunay: Danseuse, deuxieme version, 1916

Clair Wills

Stepping Out

The joy of dancing as a follower is to listen for the barely said—to interpret signs almost before they have been given, to read messages in the moment they are being sent.

August 20, 2020 issue