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New Poems

Susan Barba

For the Growers and the Grocers

November 4, 2021 issue

Richie Hofmann

At the Rustic Hamlet Built in 1783 for Marie Antoinette, Last Queen of France

November 4, 2021 issue

Jorie Graham

They Ask Me

October 21, 2021 issue

Natalie Angier

Claw & Order

What do we owe nature, and how might we do a better job of coexisting with species that do not exist for our pleasure and sustenance?

November 4, 2021 issue

Jessica Riskin

Nature’s Evolving Tastes

In a new collection of essays on Darwin’s Descent of Man, a number of scientists claim that human and animal cultures emerge from the “purposeless process” of natural selection. Darwin himself said the opposite.

October 21, 2021 issue

Clair Wills

The Wages of Virtue

Chastity seems like a simple concept, but a new history proposes that it has always been a shifting and malleable virtue.

November 4, 2021 issue

Jane Hu

Portrait of the Robot as a Young Woman

From his first novel to his latest, Kazuo Ishiguro has considered what it means to care for and attend to others.

November 4, 2021 issue

Ben Lerner

The Storyteller

W.G. Sebald’s books suggest that we are powerless to remember adequately and powerless to forget.

October 21, 2021 issue

Elizabeth Strout; illustration by Alain Pilon

“In a series of recent works, whose frequency hints at a tumultuous amount of unshared experience, Elizabeth Strout has written with dazzling acuity about a whole cluster of overlooked lives.”

— Pankaj Mishra: Writing the Other America

November 4, 2021

Current Issue

Jenny Uglow

Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy

How a Venetian masterpiece ended up in the Louvre.

October 21, 2021 issue

Laura Marsh

Are the Kids All Right?

If Jonathan Franzen’s earlier books were steeped in ironic social observation, Crossroads is an experiment in sincerity.

October 21, 2021 issue

Ursula Lindsey

In the Fire

The Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi fearlessly told unpleasant truths about discrimination against women in Arab countries.

October 21, 2021 issue

Sue Halpern

The Human Costs of AI

Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware.

October 21, 2021 issue

The Latest

Jonathan Stevenson

Not So Great Britain

The UK’s hapless part in the US-Australian submarine deal exemplifies the post-Brexit nation’s problem: how to stay relevant in world affairs after jilting its biggest trade and diplomatic partner, the EU.

October 13, 2021

Adam Shatz

Coltrane’s New ‘Love Supreme’

The studio version has long been recognized as the jazz saxophonist’s masterwork. But a recently unearthed live recording is nothing short of a revelation.

October 7, 2021

John J. Lennon, a conversation with Reginald Dwayne Betts

A Canon for the American Prisoner

“There’s something critically important that books do for us that we can’t get anywhere else—because so much of prison is trying to master the art of becoming.”

October 5, 2021

Brief Encounters

Raja Shehadeh, interviewed by Matt Seaton

In His Father’s Footsteps

“So I continued to visit Jaffa, but I had to rely more on my imagination because the reality was of an entirely different place from what he had described.”

October 16, 2021

Ben Lerner, interviewed by Jana Prikryl

Unknown Sources of Lift

“I think there’s an understandable but perilous tendency to conflate art and artist when the artist in question uses autobiographical elements in their work.”

October 9, 2021

Gavin Francis, interviewed by Lucy Jakub

Human Diagnostics

“Life in lockdown is not natural for the majority of Homo sapiens. In the ballooning of mental health problems this year, we’ve seen just how deleterious those kinds of restrictions are.”

October 2, 2021