Archive

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

Working in Their Sleep

Meatpacking workers in Arkansas, grieving loved ones lost to Covid and struggling to pay medical bills, are organizing for justice from their employer.

December 23, 2022

What Apps Mean for Food Delivery Workers

Food delivery is nothing new. But in the online delivery industry, startups, flush with venture capital, have both altered and entrenched this historically exploitative low-wage work.

September 20, 2019

Why Work Is More and More Debased

“New technologies created new ways ‘of designing and monitoring the work of other parties,’ making it easier to outsource work while retaining and even intensifying control over worker performance.”

October 23, 2014 issue

The Golden Arm

“If we pretend that this transformation will automatically create new jobs for the men and women it displaces, we will probably end up with a vastly expanded underclass, not a vastly expanded pool of computer programmers.”

October 24, 1985 issue

The Styrofoam Presidency

Many hoped Trump’s aesthetics were not a reflection of his entire political self, but merely a style that could be dropped when the occasion demanded it. But when the inauguration came, Trump trampled on some of the most hallowed public rituals of American power.

January 24, 2017

What He Really Said

President Obama’s first inauguration was the first time black people had come to Washington in great numbers, but not to protest.

February 26, 2009 issue

Beyond the Fringe

At George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, the National Mall was cordoned off by chainlink fencing for the first time ever. Such stringent measures may have been inconsistent with America’s ideals, but not, apparently, with its laws.

February 22, 2001 issue

Old Times

Richard Nixon’s self-denial, self-mythologizing, and self-discipline were on full display at his 1973 inauguration.

February 22, 1973 issue

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust.

July 16, 2009 issue

Finding My Father’s Auschwitz File

From the time I learned that my parents had three children murdered, I knew it was my job to try to restore what the Nazis took away.

January 25, 2019

The Worst of the Madness

The vast majority of Hitler’s victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp. Some ten million died in killing fields in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

November 11, 2010 issue

Unspeakable News

There was not much the Allies could have done. But, after all, they did not even do that residue.

October 22, 1981 issue

First Among Equals

“Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. In the foreground, white and red paint—conjuring threads escaping from the woman’s sewing cushion—appears as if dribbled on the canvas.”

February 7, 2019 issue

The Mysterious Women of Vermeer

Vermeer has a mind-boggling technique for transferring visual sensations from eye to canvas as if without the hand’s intervention. Color has somehow wafted down, as leaves might on water, and cohered automatically into threads and ringlets and cushions.

December 22, 2011 issue

Camera Work

“To read about Johannes Vermeer and to look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There’s an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself.”

May 31, 2001 issue

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

What Apartheid Means for Israel

A growing consensus has formed around the term—not as a rhetorical comparison to South Africa, but describing a system of domination built on the partition of Palestine.

November 5, 2021

The Gaza I Grew Up In

Working as a photojournalist there is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. You must always watch where you step.

November 6, 2020

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

Gaza vs. Liberal Zionism

Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war.

July 26, 2014

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