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Tamsin Shaw

Flacking for Facebook

How perfect that a failed Liberal Democrat should be leading the PR effort to persuade us that liberal democracy is safe with the social media giant.

April 13, 2021

Colin Thubron

The Companionship of Nature

Running like a troubled thread through Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights is the tension between a profound human need for the solace of animals and the acknowledgment, even the insistence, that they are creatures apart.

April 29, 2021 issue

Sheila Heti

Clarice Lispector and Love’s Apprentice

Who are these bizarre creatures, who ask of each other what no two people who are suffering from desire have perhaps ever asked?

April 15, 2021

Daniel Mendelsohn

Words and Other Violence

Much of the force of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction flows from the contrast between the glacial detachment of her tone and the roiling themes of German history that she explores.

April 29, 2021 issue

Sean Wilentz

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography captures the cultural jumble of great literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the self-making of the foremost self-made American.

April 29, 2021 issue

Thomas Rogers

Welcome to Germany

Since Angela Merkel admitted 1.2 million refugees in 2015 and 2016, the dire predictions about their impact on the country have not materialized.

April 29, 2021 issue

Gary Younge

‘What the Hell Can I Call Myself Except British?’

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series presents Black Britons not as objects but as protagonists, not as heroes but as humans.

April 29, 2021 issue

Howard W. French

Can America Remain Preeminent?

The global influence of the US is threatened by the potentially chaotic unraveling of a political, security, and economic architecture that has structured the world for the past seventy or so years.

April 29, 2021 issue

James Gleick

Eclipsed by Fame

There’s a scientific story to tell about Stephen Hawking, but most of his later life served to conceal it.

April 29, 2021 issue

Sarah Chihaya

All Over Desire

Mieko Kawakami’s characters live in a world that is made up almost entirely of women but is decidedly not made for them.

April 29, 2021 issue

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

“For better or worse, our species can turn its inexorable will to control nature back onto itself. Eventually, we could guide human evolution. Does this mean that we should?”

— Natalie de Souza: Editing Humanity’s Future

April 29, 2021

Current Issue

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Devika Girish

What Next, After Protest?: An Interview with Ephraim Asili

The Inheritance, a hybrid mockumentary about a Black Marxist collective, studies the everyday to imagine a new future.

April 11, 2021

Ankush Khardori

Who Will Answer for This Cruelty?

Trump officials who enforced the family separation policy have so far had a pass. This can’t be a repeat of the failed accountability over Bush-era torture.

April 9, 2021

Walton Muyumba

Floating in Time with John Edgar Wideman

In a new collection of stories, the author invites readers to sit alongside him, listening and reading in multiple directions simultaneously.

April 6, 2021

Nathan Thrall

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

March 19, 2021

Brief Encounters

Howard W. French, interviewed by Pooka Paik and Lyndon Thompson

A Dispatch from Our Correspondent

“The US must learn to discover the sense of purpose that comes from achieving things of virtue, things that have an objective social need.”

April 10, 2021

David Cole, interviewed by Matt Seaton

Armed with Arguments

“Today, the NRA is on the defensive, and the gun control movement is stronger. That political fight will more likely determine gun regulation than the Supreme Court.”

April 3, 2021

Namwali Serpell, interviewed by Lucy McKeon

The Ecstatic Internet

“Many of us have found a contingent online community of funny, smart black people from across the diaspora, one that isn’t necessarily available to us IRL.”

March 27, 2021