Society & Culture

The Neotraditionalist

The architect Robert A. M. Stern is America’s most vociferous and successful exponent of a Classicism that would be considered anachronistic in much of the rest of the world.

November 2, 2023 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

‘A Great Glory to Wealth’

Like so many of the Tuscan banker Agostino Chigi’s undertakings, the Villa Farnesina burst through all the old categories—social, architectural, and cultural—for a merchant’s house.

November 2, 2023 issue

Stacy Schiff

‘Hallucinatory Spitballs’

Arthur Miller wrote that The Crucible should not pass as a true story. Why has the play become ubiquitous in American high schools? What have we done with the actual greatest witch hunt in American history?

November 2, 2023 issue

Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo

‘Give Me All the Power’

Did Latin rock meaningfully challenge authoritarian politics in Central and South America during the twentieth century, or was it music for rebels without a cause?

October 19, 2023 issue

Megan O’Grady

Art as Action

Lucy Lippard is a canonical figure who held no truck with canons, who disdained art history only to become art history.

October 19, 2023 issue

Kaya Genç

Ruffians, Gamblers, Thieves, Outcasts

Over more than two decades, the amateur historian Reşad Ekrem Koçu led an ever-expanding project to document Istanbul’s vanishing past.

October 4, 2023

Sam Fentress

Paradise on 13th Street

Hidden within the storied Greenwich Village hangout Spain were remnants of the neighborhood’s bohemian past.

August 22, 2023

Namwali Serpell

Morrison Hall

A recent exhibit of Toni Morrison’s papers raised the question: How do you mourn a monument?

August 18, 2023

Essays by Namwali Serpell

Ming Smith: Sun Ra Space II, New York City, 1978

Namwali Serpell

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

The photographer Ming Smith’s pictures of Sun Ra from 1978 beautifully capture his energy.

July 23, 2020 issue

Elsa Triolet Library, Bobigny, France, 1996

Namwali Serpell

The Banality of Empathy

Narrative is an incredible vehicle for virtual experience—we think and feel with characters. It simulates empathy, so we believe it stimulates it. But if witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?

March 2, 2019

Namwali Serpell

Glossing Africa

Whenever African writers are on a panel together, we are asked about the continent as a whole. When African writers get together on our own, we talk about glossaries.

August 21, 2017

Matthew Bevis

A Tight Spot

A new exhibition shows that Elizabeth Bishop didn’t just send postcards; she collected, edited, and even made them.

December 9, 2023

Jennifer Wilson

We Got Next

By treating the league as a sisterhood or a worthwhile cause, a new documentary about the WNBA risks dulling its competitive edge.

December 7, 2023

Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller

Managing Monstrosity

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film suggests how matter-of-factly adults force queer children to hide their difference.

December 6, 2023

Colin B. Bailey

A New Language of Modern Art

An ambitious exhibition of the work of Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas demonstrates their affinities and their shared ambition to revolutionize painting.

December 21, 2023 issue

Elaine Blair

Uninhibited Questions

In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton argues that after decades of exhaustive debate there is still something lacking in the discourse on pornography.

December 21, 2023 issue

Kathryn Hughes

Jane Austen Gets Dressed

Sifting through the trove of well-preserved garments that belonged to Jane Austen, a new study offers a surprising new glimpse of the novelist’s life.

December 21, 2023 issue

Julian Bell

The Emptied Cosmos

Bringing readers on a walking tour of Rome’s churches, Gabriel Pihas argues in a new book that for over a millennium, nature was God’s chief display board.

December 21, 2023 issue