Erin Maglaque ‘Monstrous’ or ‘Prudente’? A new feminist history asks us to reconsider early modern queenship. April 21, 2022 issue
John Banville The Imaginative Imperative Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom is a defense of the autonomy of the arts against the stranglehold of relevance. April 21, 2022 issue
Emily Raboteau The Stories of the Bronx How did the South Bronx of the 1970s and 1980s come to symbolize slumdom all over the world when its problems could be found in any other deindustrializing American city? April 7, 2022 issue
Peter Brooks Visions of Waste The American Scene is Henry James’s indictment of what Americans had made of their land. March 24, 2022 issue
Ishion Hutchinson The Noble Fish No traces exist to point me to my African origin, but I knew that the sea around Senegal’s coast constituted a leg of the Middle Passage. February 9, 2022
Jed Perl Proud of His Conundrums The midcentury art critic Harold Rosenberg skewered his fellow New York intellectuals as a “herd of independent minds,” but his own work has more striking provocations than deep conclusions. March 24, 2022 issue
Lis Harris Strangers in a Strange Land Two recent books investigate the canny mastery of housing politics that has allowed the Hasidic Satmar sect to build thriving, isolated communities in Brooklyn and upstate New York. February 24, 2022 issue
Ian Frazier ‘Part of Why We Survived’ A new history of the long tradition of Native comedy, inside and outside mainstream entertainment January 13, 2022 issue
Janet Malcolm A Second Chance A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained. Witnesses, like stage actors, have to play to that audience if their performances are to be convincing. September 24, 2020 issue
Janet Malcolm Good Pictures If the threat of taking boring pix hangs over every photographer of ambition, Diane Arbus was perhaps more conscious of it than any other photographer. January 15, 2004 issue
Janet Malcolm The Master Writer of the City Joseph Mitchell’s notorious nonfiction inventions revealed a hybrid genre for which he had a singular genius. April 23, 2015 issue
Janet Malcolm The Trial of Alyosha In Václav Havel’s letters, the strictures of censorship elicited from him a strange, unclassifiable, inadvertent masterpiece. June 14, 1990 issue
Vivian Gornick ‘What We Want Is to Start a Revolution’ Formed in Greenwich Village in 1912 for “women who did things—and did them openly,” the Heterodoxy Club laid the groundwork for a century of American feminism. August 18, 2022 issue
Gabriel Winslow-Yost 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
Hannah Zeavin In the Flickering Light Posing for photographs with one’s television used to be a surprisingly common practice. July 26, 2022
Namwali Serpell ‘She’s Capital!’ The figure of the Whore is everywhere in art, her beauty to be gazed upon and admired. With the Internet, has she finally found her own artistic terrain? July 21, 2022 issue
James Romm Kings of the Universe Two exhibitions at the Getty Villa explore the links between the Assyrian and the Persian Empires, which both revolved around powerful monarchs. July 21, 2022 issue
Nawal Arjini Democracy in Concrete An exhibition of postcolonial architecture in South Asia looks back with nostalgia at modernism’s promise of social progress. June 26, 2022
Erica X Eisen Memories of the Metaverse Was Chris Marker’s romance with the online platform Second Life a departure from his creative and political aims, or the consummation of them? June 7, 2022
Christopher Alessandrini Occasional Residences of the Gods The artist Gala Porras-Kim has become an eloquent advocate for sacred objects in ethnographic collections. Will museums listen? June 1, 2022
Julian Lucas The Yeehaw Papyrus In his 1969 satire Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed married the Western to the Afrocentric vogue for Ancient Egypt. May 15, 2022
Ruth Bernard Yeazell Painting Herself From the beginning, female self-portraitists have chosen to show themselves at work, as if to demonstrate that they could handle a brush as well as male artists. May 12, 2022 issue
