An Open Call for Invention

A veteran composer of electronic music recalls his college introduction to John Cage and the composers who came after.

February 12, 2025

The Unhinged Presidency

Many of the legal challenges to Donald Trump’s executive overreach will come down to the Supreme Court. Will it rein him in?

February 11, 2025

Days and Nights in Gaza

Watching TV that first day, we awaited the roar of planes and the rumble of explosions. We didn’t have to wait long. 

February 9, 2025

A Country for Old Monsters

In Nosferatu and Wolf Man, the forces of evil are not so much confronted as fatalistically, inevitably succumbed to. 

February 10, 2025

Brazil at the Crossroads

Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.

February 23, 2023 issue

Bigger than Bolsonaro

After four years in power, a movement created by elite campaigns has built a mass base.

October 28, 2022

Brazil’s Clown-Elect

“The unpredictable behavior of Brazilian voters can also lead to more baffling outcomes. In 1959, for example, Cacareco, a placid, middle-aged rhinoceros at the São Paulo zoo, was voted onto the city council, having won over 100,000 votes—and this is only the most famous case in Brazil’s long history of ‘protest votes.’”

October 14, 2010

Brazil: Lula’s Prospects

“To understand Lula it is essential to realize that he is at the core a union man, a tough labor negotiator, a formidable forger of consensus, and a leader with a charismatic ability thereafter to mobilize the crowds in the direction chosen.”

December 5, 2002 issue

The Return of Trump—I

On losers, fear, the Supreme Court, the end of the FDR era, antisystemic times, and words without consequences. 

November 8, 2024

The Return of Trump—II

On Gaza, trade, con men, sinking feelings, the federal workforce, and “Brexit plus plus plus.”

November 9, 2024

The Return of Trump—III

On abortion, labor, NatCon, the rise of authoritarianism, the darkroom of propaganda, and the threat of mass deportation. 

November 10, 2024

The Return of Trump—IV

On burnout, hell, billionaires, health care, the specter of the limousine liberal, and the anti-trans agenda.

November 11, 2024

The Return of Trump—V

On tantrums, dominion, the Southern Strategy, fearmongering ads, New York’s haves and have-nots, and Candidate Fain. 

November 13, 2024

The Return of Trump—VI

On rage, fluoride, the task of the journalist, the Garden of American Heroes, and the Buffs and the Blues. 

November 15, 2024

The Return of Trump—VII

On veterans, fascism, Africa abandoned, and “less-than-kosher activities.”

November 17, 2024

Balzac’s Novel of Female Friendship

Balzac’s The Memoirs of Two Young Wives is as much a dialectical as an epistolary novel, built on the contrasts and binaries embodied in the two women’s unfolding lives, for all their nourishing friendship.

January 9, 2018

A Hungry Little Boy

“Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar).”

January 12, 2012 issue

Balzac’s Genius & Other Paradoxes

“Balzac’s claim to the title of Greatest French Novelist of All Time can hardly be disputed…. The total cast of his Comédie humaine amounts to some 3,500 characters (including a few animals)—in all of Western literature, only Shakespeare and Dickens approached such a bewildering fecundity.”

January 12, 1995 issue

Balzac Possessed

“From then on the pattern was set: an immense and increasing load of debt arising from extravagance and speculation—Balzac only had to touch a stock for the bottom to drop out of the market—against which were mortgaged the plans and profits of novel after novel. He turned his hopes and disasters into fiction as he lived through them.”

October 4, 1973 issue

The Most Influential Invention

A history of paper shares all the facts and technical processes, the quality of the rags, the size of the paper sheets, the color and texture of different surfaces and how they were achieved, but most importantly it gives us a sense of a collective human vocation for creating a world apart on the page.

August 13, 2015 issue

Disappearing Ink

“I left the New Museum’s ‘The Last Newspaper’—a show that sets out to explore the relation between newspapers and art at the end of the print era—with my fingers black from printer’s ink, just as they used to be years ago when I read the Times every morning on the subway.”

November 1, 2010

The Human Face of Type

“Serifs are not ornamental but functional: most of them are horizontal strokes that help to guide the eye rapidly and smoothly across the page. Sans-serif types, in contrast, present a thicket of vertical strokes that slow down the eye’s horizontal movement.”

August 4, 2011

The Great Comics War

Peter Maresca’s outsized and outlandish anthology Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, 1895–1915, shows just how sensational this newspaper art form was in its early years.

December 31, 2013

Our Silent Partners

Merlin Sheldrake explores how fungi challenge our understanding of nonhuman intelligence and complicate the boundaries between one organism and another.

October 7, 2021 issue

The Oldest Forest

The promise and pitfalls of commercializing kelp.

December 17, 2020 issue

Language of the Field

What hold do wildflowers have on the land, and on our hearts and tongues?

October 26, 2022

What the Trees Say

“If you look up at those mossy, fern-encrusted branches, you may well find redstarts and robins and wood warblers searching for insects, while woodpeckers and little owls build their nests in hollows in the trunk.”

December 8, 2016 issue

Clinton Agonistes

The Clinton impeachment was a situation in which a handful of people with something to gain (a book contract, a sinecure as a network “analyst,” or the justification of a failure to get either of the Clintons on Whitewater), managed to harness this phenomenon and ride it.

October 22, 1998 issue

Reagan’s Junta

“The implications of government by secret presidential junta strike at the very roots of the American system of government. One way to think about them is to note how the Iran-contra affair has been defended or rationalized by those politically or ideologically closest to the President.”

January 29, 1987 issue

A Special Supplement: Impeachment

There are two reasons for impeaching Richard Nixon. One is that this may be the only legal proceeding to determine the President’s complicity in the Watergate scandal. The other is that only so grave a step may deter a future President from such abuses.

June 28, 1973 issue

He Was No Moses

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

December 16, 2021 issue

A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”

June 25, 2023

DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

March 22, 2023

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

How Smart Are Computers?

“Artificial Intelligence has gone through a sober process of realizing that human beings are cleverer than it supposed. It has turned to a more cautious and diversified strategy of accumulating ‘know-how’ rather than mounting frontal assaults.”

November 15, 1973 issue

Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Adulterer

It is best to look at Giacomo Joyce as a private journal, not intended for publication, reflecting Joyce’s obsessions with adultery, dark oriental beauties, underclothes, laced boots, theology, Elizabethan music, and so on.

February 29, 1968 issue

The Politics of Joyce

Joyce was not the only young man in the late Victorian period to quarrel with established powers; socialists and atheists were common enough. But for him these were adjectives rather than nouns, the term they modified being “artist.”

June 9, 1977 issue

Joyce’s Many Lives

Joyce was an Irishman, a Dubliner, a lapsed or apostate Catholic, a heavy drinker, a spendthrift, a fancy dresser, an epicure, a pretty good tenor, a lover of Italian opera, a woebegone father, and a devoted but exasperating husband.

October 21, 1993 issue

Joyce in Bloom

“La nostra bella Trieste! I have often said that angrily but tonight I feel it true. I long to see the lights twinkling along the riva as the train passes [the castle of] Miramar. After all, Nora, it is the city which has sheltered us.”

February 8, 2001 issue

Joyce: Heroic, Comic

Dirty, slippery, uproarious, demented, and hysterically funny

October 25, 2012 issue

Dubliners

Reading Ulysses is a kind of strenuous dreaming, very like writing fiction.

January 13, 2022 issue

The Fight for Uyghur Rights

“The Uyghur language is banned in schools, hospitals, and government buildings. Uyghur mosques are being shut down, Uyghur cultural activities are being banned, and there are no places to speak and practice our culture.”

February 8, 2025

The Campaign to Destroy Public Schools

“It is called ‘school choice,’ but the schools choose, not the students or families.”

February 1, 2025

The Ungovernable Economy

“When I look at the world around us, I perceive a gigantic crisis of political legitimacy.”

January 25, 2025

What Happened

“We must allow the past to speak on its own terms, even when asking questions that are pertinent to the present.”

January 11, 2025