Managing Monstrosity

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film suggests how matter-of-factly adults force queer children to hide their difference. 

December 6, 2023

Combatants for Peace

We are a group of former Israeli soldiers and formerly imprisoned Palestinians. Our work is a model for the nonviolent way forward.

November 23, 2023

Bad Facts, Bad Law

In a recent Supreme Court oral argument about disarming domestic abusers, originalism itself was put to the test.

November 25, 2023

Inexorable Motion

A dispatch from the Art Editor

November 29, 2023

Biden’s Selective Outrage

The rhetorical choice to pair Israel and Ukraine has not created a common moral cause. It has exposed a double standard.

November 14, 2023

‘Let Us Not Hurry to Our Doom’

The first Lebanon War helped lay the groundwork for Israel’s escalations of violence in Gaza. Who will heed its warnings?

November 9, 2023

An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory

Appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.

November 20, 2023

Israel: The Left in Peril

Since October 7, Israel’s left has encountered unprecedented repression. Could its ideas nonetheless point the way forward?

November 12, 2023

What Were Dinosaurs For?

It has become impossible to think about extinction in the old ways, to regard the end-Cretaceous demise of some 80 percent of life on earth as a remote, alien fact.

December 19, 2019 issue

Dinosaur Crazy

In Terrible Lizard, Deborah Cadbury sets herself the task of explaining how the curious Victorian image of dinosaurs—“Would it not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill?” mused Charles Dickens in Bleak House—came to be.

January 17, 2002 issue

First Fine Careless Raptor

“Mammals and dinosaurs diverged from a common ancestor about 260 million years ago. Dinosaurs subsequently evolved to fill every possible ecological niche, from which they ruled the earth for 160 million years and became the most successful vertebrates in the history of the planet. During all that time we mammals managed to evolve into nothing larger than a cat.”

April 4, 1996 issue

Dinomania

When dinosaurs get the Hollywood treatment, will museums follow suit?

August 12, 1993 issue

The Man Who Was France

“Even the French who found themselves in England did not rush to accept de Gaulle: to the contrary, this remote and chilly figure lunching alone at the Savoy appealed to few of them, and most of the troops who had been evacuated from France that summer eventually made their way back across the Channel and regarded Pétain as the legitimate head of the French government.”

January 16, 2020 issue

The Truth About the Resistance

Who were the resisters, what were they resisting, and what difference did they really make?

February 25, 2016 issue

France Without Glory

“The political authorities born of the Resistance thought it prudent to speak and act as though the Vichy government of 1940–1944 had been a brief, unhappy interlude, a sort of illegitimate interruption of republican continuity…. This unity of purpose, however, was bought at the price of an incomplete confrontation with the memory and experience of the occupation years.”

May 23, 1996 issue

French Collaborators: The New Debate

“A striking fact about the Frenchmen indicted for crimes against humanity is that…each of them had an entirely successful career in France after the war.”

June 25, 1992 issue

What the Little Woman Was Up To

An exhibition of books, ephemera, and realia made by women over the past five hundred years makes tangible the kind of contributions that typically go ignored.

March 26, 2020 issue

Old Wives’ Tales

“The oral contraceptives and abortifacients known to the Greeks and Romans were both effective and also safer than one might have expected.”

November 18, 1993 issue

Darn that Darning

“Despite our view of them as repressed and exploited, we know that nineteenth-century women had contraceptive practices, orgasms, used nursing bottles and abortifacients; in Michigan at one period, one-third of pregnancies were terminated by abortion.”

April 12, 1984 issue

An Abortion War Solution: The Celibacy Amendment

In the interest of equity, the anti-abortion zealots would honor their obsession by proposing a sort of balancing of the human budget: a Celibacy Before Marriage Amendment to the US Constitution. Let us see how that goes down.

June 17, 2019

He Ridiculed the Nazis

The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life.

September 14, 2017

The Genius in Exile

“You lose one home after another, I say to myself. Here I am, sitting with my wanderer’s staff. My feet are sore, my heart is tired, my eyes are dry.”

November 6, 2014 issue

The Man with Many Qualities

“From the moment the Reichstag burned in 1933, Robert Musil foresaw how badly Germany was about to betray itself.”

March 18, 1999 issue

Art of a Nasty Time

Nazi art showed how certain already prevalent German traditions and characteristics could be harnessed to the Nazi cause. What is more, they recalled corresponding features in the art of other countries—the kind of tame classicism, flashy Italianate portraiture, sub-Barbizon rusticity, and lumpy earthiness that could be found also in London, Rome, Paris, and New York.

June 26, 1980 issue

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

The Endless Occupation, a New Understanding

“Today’s reality in Israel-Palestine is at odds with everything the United States claims to stand for.”

March 20, 2021

Israel Without Illusions

“No one who regularly visits the Palestinian territories controlled by Israel has to speculate about whether or not Israel is engaged in the routine abuse of human rights.”

December 17, 2009 issue

Holy War

“A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them.”

August 3, 1967 issue

Dominant Orthodoxies

“So many advocates of the ‘peace process’ since the 1990s have simply ignored the structural reality that makes meaningful sovereignty and self-determination for Palestinians—the attainment of basic rights and freedoms—impossible.”

December 2, 2023

Basic Principles of Humanity

“Willfully impeding the delivery of relief supplies, in particular life-saving fuel, is a war crime.”

November 18, 2023

When the Brain Becomes Data

“Ever since we became ‘the product,’ we’ve been trading vast amounts of personal data for the privilege of engaging online.”

November 4, 2023