Finding My Roots

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life. 

September 29, 2023

Eight and Skate

Today’s iteration of the United Auto Workers—now on a decisive strike—is both a renewal of an old tradition and a new creation.

September 23, 2023

‘We Fight Today, We’ll Wrestle Tomorrow’

Imported to the capital by communities displaced in the country’s wars, wrestling has become one of Sudan’s political battlegrounds. 

September 22, 2023

Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins

A newly reissued recording proves that the late saxophonist Pharoah Sanders could get the grandest of effects from the humblest of riffs. 

September 19, 2023

Frankenstein’s Mother

As Muriel Spark points out in her biography of Mary Shelley, Shelley’s lucid, rational, and straightforward prose makes the surreal horrors of her story much more effective than the inflated rhetoric of her contemporaries’ Gothic tales. 

November 19, 1987 issue

On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares figure prominently in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

February 5, 2015 issue

The Edge of Horror

William Sloane might have become a master of the horror genre, or created an entirely new one. Yet we must be grateful for what we have, which is a splendid rediscovery.

September 18, 2015

One of America’s Best

Ambrose Bierce had no use for the refined eeriness of the English-style ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton, instead setting his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation in uncut forests and abandoned mining towns.

May 10, 2012 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

Food Tips for Christmas

“Where the Weathermen blew up buildings and shot police officers, today’s radicals defy federal food laws, revel in unpasteurized milk, dine on fried grasshoppers, frog fallopian tubes, and Filipino balut.”

December 19, 2013 issue

Russia: You Are What You Eat

“Recipes range from the dreaded gefilte fish to a particularly fanciful borscht—dishes that coexist only in this book and, so far as I know, at Veselka Cafe in the East Village, for only in these places can a quintessentially Ashkenazi Jewish dish and a quintessentially Ukrainian one be united by their geographic origin rather than forced apart by their ethnic ones.”

November 21, 2013 issue

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

Food

“I was brought up on English food. But not fish and chips, spotted dick, toad in the hole, Yorkshire pud, or other delicacies of British home cooking. These my mother scorned as somehow unhealthy…. So she did what every other cook in England in those days did: she boiled everything to death.”

February 25, 2010 issue

Garum Masala

Dramatic archaeological discoveries—including a marble Buddha in Egypt and jars of Mediterranean garum (fish sauce) and olive oil in India—have led scholars to radically reassess the size and importance of the trade between ancient Rome and India.

April 20, 2023 issue

Missionaries, Merlins, and Merchants

Recent scholarship illuminates how medieval Southeast Asia transformed Indian cultural and religious ideas brought to the region by monks and traders.

December 22, 2022 issue

Painting the Cosmic Ocean

“Mountain fortresses suddenly blossomed with artists, many of whom had been trained in the now-defunct Mughal ateliers, each family of painters competing with and inspiring one another in a manner comparable to the rival city-states of Renaissance Italy.”

June 6, 2019 issue

The Greatest Ancient Picture Gallery

One of the great wonders of India: the painted caves of Ajanta

October 23, 2014 issue

The Point Guard

“Even though my job is mostly to stay home and read, I like to be out in the world absorbing as much as I can so I don’t miss references or fall behind the rhythms of life that new writers are trying to capture.”

September 30, 2023

Take It Easy

“I do think ‘humorist’ tends to get used in a way that pins a little college degree on a comic writer.”

September 23, 2023

A Marx for All Seasons

“An Internet dominated by the profit motive is also an Internet that violates our privacy, amplifies right-wing propaganda, and intensifies various kinds of social inequalities.”

September 16, 2023