A Right to Commit Malpractice?

If the Supreme Court overturns a law banning licensed therapists from offering “conversion therapy,” it would throw into doubt how states have always regulated professional speech. 

October 18, 2025

When a Salmon Strays

Swimming up Argentina’s Paraná River, a non-native fish encountered a landscape being remade at an unprecedented speed.

October 14, 2025

The End of Asylum

The second Trump administration has collapsed the distinction between political and economic migrants. Did it make sense to separate them to begin with?

October 12, 2025

‘One Being Dancing’

In her latest performance, the eighty-five-year-old dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs takes up one of her great influences: the work of Gertrude Stein. 

October 10, 2025

Psalmist of the Gap

Often mislabeled as a proto-Zionist oracle of vengeance, Hayim Nahman Bialik speaks to us now instead as a poet of poise under soul-crushing pressure. 

October 9, 2025

Serene and Delirious

Both the strengths and weaknesses of Miguel Gomes’s films come from their commitment to capturing the porousness of life.

October 5, 2025

The War Over Defense Tech

Silicon Valley firms like Palantir and Anduril are threatening the foundations of US industrial policy even as they call for reenergizing it. What made their current bid for power possible?

October 4, 2025

Catching Us Looking

Gustave Caillebotte subverts our expectations about lines of sight and lines of desire.

September 30, 2025

The Costs of the Cloud

How much power does AI consume?

September 27, 2025

My History with Needles

By strange alchemy, a treatment for allergies also cured my aversion to literature. It was those jabs that made me a writer.

June 23, 2021

‘Since I Became Symptomatic’

When I wake with my heart pounding in the middle of the night, my sheets are soaked with sweat that must be full of virus. The virus is my new partner, our third companion in the apartment, wetly draped across my body in the night.

March 26, 2020

The Feeling of Disorder

“I could say I felt well, in my usual state of health—at least such health and energy as a fairly active eighty-one-year-old can hope to enjoy—and this despite learning, a month earlier, that much of my liver was occupied by metastatic cancer.”

April 23, 2015 issue

Night

“Morning brings some respite, though it says something about the lonely journey through the night that the prospect of being transferred to a wheelchair for the rest of the day should raise one’s spirits!”

January 14, 2010 issue

The Act of Persuasion

The drama of Elizabeth Hardwick’s life emanated from an elemental restlessness and a desire for sovereignty over her intellect and emotion.

April 21, 2022 issue

The Medium Inquisitor

“Clement Greenberg, for a slew of reasons, was the most influential art critic in American history.”

October 21, 1993 issue

Surviving in the Ruins

“I often thought of Cyril Connolly in middle age as a phenomenal baby in a pram, his hands reaching out greedily for what he saw, especially when it was far beyond him, or, if he got it, delighted for a moment and then throwing it out and crying to get it back.”

March 15, 1984 issue

The Perils of Pauline

“Ms. Kael’s quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses have not only taken over her work so thoroughly that hardly anything else, nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility, remains; they have also proved contagious, so that the content and level of critical discussion, of movies but also of other forms, have been altered astonishingly for the worse.”

August 14, 1980 issue

Chthonic Forces

“The responsibility falls to anyone who wants stay alert and actually understand the radical right and combat it, not just make theatrical gestures.”

October 18, 2025

New Media Rules

“With any new medium, there’s a formative period before the rules are set when you can be part of discovering what the form will be.”

October 11, 2025

Anyone Can Whistle

“I’m drawn to the idea that ethics is as much about describing who we are as prescribing what we should do.”

October 4, 2025

What If We Took Democracy Seriously?

“Democracy isn’t just some woolly ideal but the very means by which material lives might be improved.”

September 27, 2025

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

May 13, 2021 issue

The Witch Hunters’ Crusade

Why did sixteenth-century investigators of witchcraft place such an inordinate emphasis on demonic sex, and why did they concentrate their inquiries on women?

September 26, 2002 issue

The Hide That Binds

A medical librarian’s history of books covered in human skin.

November 5, 2020 issue

Arthur Kern's Creatures

Arthur Kern’s unsettling, grotesque sculptures bring to mind twins fighting for space within the womb, disembodied heads frozen in cryogenic pods, an astronaut doomed to float forever through outer space.

June 1, 2016

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

The Crying of September 11

“Bleeding Edge is best understood not as the account of a master of ironized paranoia coming to grips with the cultural paradigm he helped to define but as something much braver and riskier: an attempt to acknowledge, even at the risk of a melodramatic organ chord, that paradigm’s most painful limitation.”

November 7, 2013 issue

What Happened at Gordita Beach?

“The surfing and doping world of late-Sixties California offers Pynchon something similar to the forms of popular poetry and song that support the later work of García Márquez, the ballads and boleros full of broken hearts and eternal love. No thought is banal if it is up to something.”

September 24, 2009 issue

Inside the Time Machine

“[Against the Day] may appear titanic and overwhelming from a distance, but close up it is oddly homespun, friendly, accommodating, and free of such oppressions as symmetry and hierarchy.”

January 11, 2007 issue

Entropology

“The narrative machinery just seems to crank out one fabulous yarn after another. The book is, in short, in no great rush about getting nowhere in particular: it is novelistically ‘on the road.’”

June 12, 1997 issue

Any Place You Want

“Pynchon displays throughout Vineland what might be called an internal loyalty: he keeps the faith with the generally feckless and almost invariably inarticulate misfits he assembles, tracking their looping thoughts and indecisive actions with a patience that seems grounded in affection.”

March 15, 1990 issue

Rocketing to the Apocalypse

“Gravity’s Rainbow, like many other modern novels, like all novels in one sense, is set in the writer’s mind, but Pynchon’s mind, by virtue of his imaginative anxiety or historical care, is full not only of personal obsessions…but also of more major recent historical deposits than it seems a single mind could take.”

March 22, 1973 issue

Fiction à la Mode

“Pynchon is again whispering something in our ear about the meaning of coincidence, the possibility of recurrence in history, and the circularity of time…. The Crying of Lot 49 is one of those mystery novels that can’t be solved.”

June 23, 1966 issue

Cook’s Tour

“Nothing more intricately conceived than Thomas Pynchon’s first novel has appeared in American fiction since the work in the thirties by Faulkner, Nathanael West and Djuna Barnes, the last two being among the writers who have given him the courage of his artifices and of the assumptions that go with them.”

June 1, 1963 issue

How to Blow Up a Planet

For liberal supporters of the “abundance” movement, deregulation is crucial to solving climate and economic crises. Their critics argue something more confrontational is needed.

September 25, 2025 issue

Free Markets, Besieged Citizens

Why did Democratic presidents embrace an economic credo that annihilated their own public philosophy and its appeal to the electorate?

July 21, 2022 issue

What’s the Matter with Liberals?

“Once again, the ‘party of the people’ chose to sacrifice the liberal economic policies that used to connect them to such voters on the altar of centrism.”

May 12, 2005 issue

Watch Out, Democrats!

“Instead of personal prosperity, traditional working-class voters get condescending lectures about the virtues of free trade, often couched in language suggesting that anyone who doubts the benefits of globalization is a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather.”

July 20, 2000 issue

‘People Are Not a Crisis’

Eric Adams has insisted that his administration is doing its best to house New York’s asylum seekers, but the city’s shortage of shelter space is the result of political choices.

July 23, 2023

Exiles

I recognize in these young people—driven from their homes by war, famine, poverty—an unshakable energy called Hope.

July 11, 2023

The Land of Dust and Plastic

In Almería, the Moroccan and West African migrant workers who sustain the region’s booming agriculture industry find themselves either neglected or persecuted by the state. 

June 24, 2023

Asylum in Limbo

Like the Trump-era policy it replaces, Biden’s new asylum ban suggests that certain migrants are less deserving of humanitarian protection than others. 

May 28, 2023

‘Infinite License’

The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.

April 24, 2025 issue

Living the Nakba

Two recent memoirs tell the story of generations of Palestinian grief and struggle.

October 3, 2024 issue

Acts of Language

Amid the actual violence of Israel’s assault on Gaza, why have so many writers treated pro-Palestine speech as a threat?

June 13, 2024

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

Video Games: The Secret Life

How games work and what they can mean

October 8, 2015 issue

Could Internet Culture Be Different?

Kevin Driscoll’s study of early Internet communities contains a vision for a less hostile and homogenous future of social networking.

June 9, 2022 issue

Generation Why?

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks.

November 25, 2010 issue

Exhausting All Possibilities

The video game The Stanley Parable is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.

August 18, 2022 issue

Doing Their Own Research

An electoral coalition of the conspiracy cultures of both the Christian right and the countercultural left helped bring Donald Trump back to power, and now pseudoscience and paranoia are in the ascendant.

May 29, 2025 issue

The Birchers & the Trumpers

A new biography of Robert Welch traces the origins and history of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist John Birch Society and, in the process, provides historical perspective on the far-right populism of the Trump era.

June 23, 2022 issue

Reading Sade in the Age of Epstein

Reading Sade in the age of #MeToo and Jeffrey Epstein is an uncanny experience, for his novels are also a blueprint for the world of the sexual predators of today.

February 12, 2020

The New Politics of Conspiracy

Our allegiance to a fact-based reality has been constantly challenged during this presidential election. But conspiracy theories work on a different level than mere lies. They are impossible to disprove.

November 2, 2016