Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Society & Culture

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 (1934–2021)

Honoré Daumier: Le Défenseur, circa 1862–1865

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

Joseph Mitchell in Lower Manhattan, near the old Fulton Fish Market; photograph by his wife, Therese Mitchell

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

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

Julian Barnes

What Are You Looking At?

No fin-de-siècle artist was more fascinated by the artistic relevance of gawkers on the streets of Paris than Félix Vallotton.

May 12, 2022 issue

Caroline Fraser

‘Anxious for a Mayflower’

In A Nation of Descendants, Francesca Morgan traces the American use and abuse of genealogy from the Daughters of the American Revolution to Roots.

May 12, 2022 issue

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

Lorrie Moore

The Tender Trap

We ask marriage to provide personal growth plus affectionate companionship, sexual appreciation, and spiritual renewal. Can it sustain that expectation?

December 16, 2021 issue

Kevin Young

‘And I One of Them’

Nancy Cunard’s relationship with the jazz musician Henry Crowder helped inspire her years of civil rights activism. Her romance wasn’t just with him, but with Blackness.

December 2, 2021 issue

Martin Filler

Hollywood’s Master Builder

The African-American architect Paul R. Williams channeled the glamorous but breezy spirit of the Golden Age of Hollywood in designs that allowed his clients and the public to imagine themselves in fantasies akin to those spun out by the great movie studios.

October 21, 2021 issue