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Israel’s Annexation, Palestinian Resistance

A Legacy of Torture in Chicago

Chicago has a police torture problem. The exact size of this problem is not known and perhaps never will be. What is known for sure is that between 1972 and 1991 at least 125 black Chicagoans were tortured by police officers in a building on the city’s predominantly black South Side. They were tortured into confessing, and sometimes tortured more afterward; these confessions were used to send them to prison, and in some cases to death row. During the recent wave of protests set off by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it was obvious that, for many in Chicago, the city’s legacy of police torture was a palpable presence, informing the protesters’ anger—but also their anxiety about the fate of their arrested comrades.

It is a Choice (because Kanye)

francine j. harris

A poem

He Made Stone Speak

Ingrid D. Rowland

Late in life, Michelangelo took on a series of huge, daunting projects, fully aware that he would never live to see them completed.

Our First Authoritarian Crackdown

Brenda Wineapple

Wendell Bird’s ‘Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions Under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798’

Wanting Wrong

Anne Enright

On Miranda Popkey’s ‘Topics of Conversation’ and Ariana Harwicz’s ‘Die, My Love’

The Rose

Ben Lerner

A poem

Ransacking the Republic

Walter M. Shaub Jr.

Trump and his Republican wrecking crew are ripping out the floorboards under the government ethics program.

Democracy’s Red Line

Hari Kunzru

On Masha Gessen’s ‘Surviving Autocracy’

Just Use Your Thinking Pump!

Jessica Riskin

What is the scientific method, and when, where, and how did it become, as the kids say, a thing?

He Made Stone Speak

Ingrid D. Rowland

Late in life, Michelangelo took on a series of huge, daunting projects, fully aware that he would never live to see them completed.

What Is College Worth?

Jonathan Zimmerman

As tuition and student debt continue to skyrocket, it’s worth asking how much longer we can sustain this system.

A Legacy of Torture in Chicago

Peter C. Baker

Laurence Ralph’s ‘The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence’

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The Sickness in Our Food Supply

Michael Pollan

The pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well.

What Kind of Country Do We Want?

Marilynne Robinson

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

The Pillage of India

Christopher de Bellaigue

William Dalrymple’s ‘The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire’ and Shashi Tharoor’s ‘Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India’

The Housing Vultures

Francesca Mari

The investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis are dictating the bailout of this one.

Sex and Sincerity

Sigrid Nunez

What happens when someone sets out to write fiction that is “100 percent pornographic and 100 percent high art”?

Horace’s How-To

Gregory Hays

“Human” is the opening word of the ‘Ars Poetica.’ This is unlikely to be an accident.

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When Will We Care About Domestic Violence?

Caroline Fraser

For centuries, men have been saying, “I’ll tear her all to pieces,” and doing it, too

The Defender of Differences

Kwame Anthony Appiah

On Franz Boas and his critics

Why We Need Postal Democracy

David Cole

In the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans may have discovered the ultimate voter suppression tactic.

Brand New Dems?

Joseph O’Neill

Democrats are terrible at “messaging.” It’s time to fix that.

Getting Away With It

Andrew Martin

Nell Zink’s books are defined by a fervent restlessness, a desire to ignore the strictures that usually confine the contemporary novel.

Botch on the Rhine

Max Hastings

A meticulous and justly angry account of one of the great cock-ups of World War II

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Vector in Chief

Fintan O’Toole

To understand Trump’s incoherence, we have to take into account two contradictory impulses within the right-wing mindset: paranoia and risk.

The Master of Unknowing

Susan Tallman

Gerhard Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation.

Realists of the Soviet Fantasy

Sophie Pinkham

Artists like Deineka and Samokhvalov managed to produce valuable work while navigating the shoals of Soviet doctrine.

Other Voices, Other Rooms

Leslie Jamison

People told me motherhood would feel like deprivation—losing time, losing sleep, losing freedom—but in the beginning it felt more like sudden and exhausting plenitude.

Emergency Responder

Michael Greenberg

Prior to the pandemic, few could have predicted the astonishing performance of New York’s unloved governor, Andrew Cuomo

Opera at the Edge

Matthew Aucoin

Perhaps, in our newfound state of isolation, we can learn new ways to listen across borders, with open ears

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