An Open Letter in Support of Luciano Canfora

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is taking an eighty-one-year-old historian to court for having expressed an opinion on her politics.

April 17, 2024

The Next Mass Extinction?

As avian influenza spreads to the farthest reaches of the planet, scientists have expressed both urgency and fatalism.

April 14, 2024

In the Path of Totality

Dispatches from the 2024 solar eclipse

April 12, 2024

Voice Lessons

There’s much to learn about independent media from the life and death of The Village Voice. 

April 11, 2024

How to Understand the Dreyfus Affair

“The Dreyfus Affair demonstrates the fragility of reason, of the rights of man, and indeed of civilized values when a nation feels itself under threat from an external or internal enemy.”

June 10, 2010 issue

Holy Hysteria

“From January until October 1898 a convulsion of anti-Semitism ran through France; no major population center was spared, whether there were Jews living in it or not. There were demonstrations and riots, attacks on synagogues and shops; ‘patriots’ encouraged hotelkeepers to evict Jews from their rooms.”

April 10, 2003 issue

The Lesson of the Dreyfus Case

“Another book about the Dreyfus Affair? What could possibly justify loading another volume upon that already over-crowded shelf? The simplest answer is the timelessness of the story. It is a morality tale.”

February 27, 1986 issue

No End to the Affair

“French politics after 1900 were not the same as before. Perhaps even without the Affair, the new forces—socialists demanding reform, syndicalists calling for direct action, a new right-wing anti-democratic nationalism represented by the Action Française, a renewed movement among the Radicals for the final separation of the Roman Church from the French State—these would have begun to make themselves felt; but there seems little doubt that the Dreyfus experience accelerated these developments.”

May 18, 1967 issue

The Road to Famine in Gaza

Hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza are at the brink of famine—a human-made disaster with roots in Israel’s history of using food as a weapon. 

March 30, 2024

Unilateral Actions

The impending invasion of Rafah—where over 1.4 million Palestinians are trapped—shows how far Israel has pushed its ambitions in Gaza.

March 2, 2024

Gaza: Two Rights of Return

Most Palestinians in Gaza are now displaced at least twice over. They have a right to choose where to return.

January 27, 2024

The American Jewish Left in Exile

Those of us whose Jewishness isn’t tethered to Israel find ourselves increasingly at the margins of American Jewish life. Do we need our own institutions?

January 28, 2024

Anti-Rent Wars, Then and Now

Amid the 1840s economic crisis, landlords tried to drive out tenants in default. The remarkable movement that rose to challenge evictions can be a model for today’s housing activists.

October 25, 2021

Tenants Under Siege: Inside New York City’s Housing Crisis

New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency. The tide of homelessness is only the most visible symptom.

August 17, 2017 issue

Kicked Out in America!

“It is odd that the shortage of low-income housing gets little attention, even among experts on the left. Decent affordable shelter is a primal human need, and its disappearance is one of the most troubling results of growing inequality.”

March 10, 2016 issue

The Rise of the Homeless

“Three years into Ronald Reagan’s first administration, the effects of his social welfare policies—from the elimination of certain nutrition and health programs to the drastic cuts in federal subsidies for the construction of low-income housing—were just being felt in the cities.”

February 16, 1989 issue

The Great Disenchantment

Thanks to this latest, very public family rift, more cracks are appearing in the façade of the United Kingdom’s royalist consensus.

March 9, 2021

Windsor Knot

Even in the face of looming austerity, the royals’ appeal remains resilient.

April 28, 2011 issue

The Merry Wives of Windsor

On July 29, 1981, a wedding took place in a large and well-known London church between two members of the English upper classes.

June 12, 1986 issue

Britain’s Game of Thrones

From the start, Meghan Markle upstaged her royal relatives in ways bound to ruffle feathers in a family obsessed with status and protocol.

December 2, 2017

Show Us You Care, Ma’am

Why was no flag flying at half mast over Buckingham Palace?

October 9, 1997 issue

Ma’am’s Life and Loves

King George VI said that while Princess Elizabeth was his pride, Princess Margaret was his joy.

August 16, 2018 issue

Royal Tragedy

By turning herself into a star, Diana managed to defy the House of Windsor and created a very modern fairy tale: the royal celebrity, Diana, Princess of ‘Vanity Fair.’

October 9, 1997 issue

A Great Family Business

The first season of ‘The Crown’ is essentially the ‘Godfather’ narrative, with Elizabeth as Michael Corleone.

March 23, 2017 issue

‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’

A bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans’ metadata is an important first step, but it addresses only one part of the NSA’s surveillance activities.

May 10, 2014

What the NSA Knows

“The NSA and its predecessors have been gaining secret, illegal access to the communications of Americans for nearly a century.”

August 15, 2013 issue

The Ears of America

“The National Security Agency was established by President Truman—secretly: its official charter has never been made public—in the fall of 1952, but its true origins go back to the First World War.”

February 3, 1983 issue

On NSA Spying: A Letter to Congress

We are scholars of constitutional law and former government officials. We write in our individual capacities as citizens concerned by the Bush administration’s National Security Agency domestic spying program…. The Justice Department’s defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law.

February 9, 2006 issue

Synthetic Thinking

“In medicine, you don’t have an answer when you start out. It’s the same kind of synthetic process as political philosophy, but in a different dimension.”

April 13, 2024

The Forms of the Tools

“When students ask me today how they can find their style, I propose they put their computers and digital drawings pads aside and discover what happens with their own hands and bodies, with all the attendant mistakes and flaws.”

April 6, 2024

The Price of Stability

“Prabowo’s victory opens a window onto how the depredations, violence, and corruption of the Suharto era unevenly influence the present.”

March 30, 2024

‘Tell It as It Is’

“Remembrance is less pressing than daily survival, and the time for truth-telling may never come. I suppose this is another reason to persist with in-depth reporting on Darfur—to tell the stories of the living as well as the dead.”

March 23, 2024

Into the Cave

Episode Six of “The Critic and Her Publics”

April 9, 2024

A Gender Emergency

Episode Five of “The Critic and Her Publics”

March 26, 2024

The Channeler

Episode Four of “The Critic and Her Publics”

March 12, 2024

‘I Am the Cabbage Writer’

Episode Three of “The Critic and Her Publics”

February 27, 2024