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Dan Chiasson

This Ain’t No Disco

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

March 25, 2021 issue

Tishani Doshi

Advice for Pliny the Elder, Big Daddy of Mansplainers

a poem

March 25, 2021 issue

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

Andrew Martin

Deeper into the Labyrinth

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous books expand our sense of his novels and stories as a living system, as illogical and abrupt as the world we inhabit.

March 25, 2021 issue

Maureen N. McLane

Winter

a poem

March 25, 2021 issue

Darryl Pinckney

A Gift for the Long Game

Obama’s memoir of his first term is a story of aiming high and settling for what he could get.

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

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

Gary Saul Morson

Casting Pearls Before Repetilovs

The brief, dashing life of Alexander Griboedov, who wrote the most-performed play in the Russian repertory, married a princess, and died during a bloody uprising in Persia.

March 25, 2021 issue

Bea Nettles: Golden Evenin, 1975; from the exhibition ‘Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory,’ on view at the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois, through March 6, 2021. For more on Nettles’s work, see Nicole Rudick’s essay.

“Climate fiction is a genre of necessity—a new, rapidly expanding chorus of alarm. It’s beginning to seem strange not to mention climate change in realistic fiction, and not only because it’s an existential threat.”

— Regina Marler: The Emergency Everywhere

March 25, 2021

Current Issue

The Latest

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

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

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

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

Tishani Doshi

Advice for Pliny the Elder, Big Daddy of Mansplainers

a poem

March 25, 2021 issue

Maureen N. McLane

Winter

a poem

March 25, 2021 issue

Boris Dralyuk