Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Society & Culture

Coco Fusco

Deaccessioning Empire

A few daring curators are confronting the imperial histories of their museums.

February 25, 2021 issue

Jenny Uglow

They Made London Their Own

A new book traces the multitudinous contributions of migrants to the capital, as well as their persistent exploitation.

December 3, 2020 issue

Marina Warner

Splash

Fantastic beliefs, in the form of false claims and urban legends, have been traveling irresistibly since the eighteenth century. The effect today has been amplified by social media; mermaid sightings rank in popularity alongside those of aliens, angels, and unicorns.

March 25, 2021 issue

Cintra Wilson

Waste Not, Shop Not

‘Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion—and the Future of Clothes’ by Dana Thomas

February 27, 2020 issue

Christopher Benfey

Coffins and Jukeboxes

August 16, 2018 issue

The Baby Grand bar at 319 West 125th Street, Harlem, 1977; photograph by Camilo José Vergara from Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto

Darryl Pinckney

The Real Harlem

Camilo José Vergara’s ‘Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto’

April 3, 2014 issue

The University of California, Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall, in a scene from Frederick Wiseman’s At Berkeley

Stephen Greenblatt

Wondrous, Fragile, Tedious Berkeley

February 6, 2014 issue

A photograph by Stephen Shore from Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971–1979, a collection of his images of the North American landscape just published by Mack

Robert Macfarlane

The Crapola Sublime

April 9, 2020 issue

On the Town

A shared room at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter, housed since 1984 in the former psychiatric building of Bellevue Hospital, New York City, 2010; photograph by Eric Michael Johnson

Jay Neugeboren

Take Me to Bellevue

Though sometimes maligned as New York’s own bedlam, the centuries-old public hospital has never turned away a patient—and is itself a great survivor.

January 19, 2017 issue

Alfred Kazin

The Bridge

Beauty in power, beauty through power: it has become a symbol of the American longing to wrest beauty out of a purely industrial environment.

July 15, 1965 issue

The exterior of the newly renovated MoMA, showing the expanded lobby and the base of 53W53, a new tower designed by Jean Nouvel, whose second through fifth floors are occupied by the museum, October 2019

Martin Filler

Megalo-MoMA

Now, to go with the airport-terminal style of the Taniguchi building, we have a combination of corporate bank branch and provincial convention center.

December 5, 2019 issue

Susannah Jacob, photographs by Radcliffe Roye

What Happened to the West Village?

The neighborhood became the epicenter of what the remorseless rise of rents will do to a once mixed and diverse city, rich foremost in its peoples and cultures.

October 9, 2019

Jean Stafford

A Sense of the Past

The city has always grown in violent spurts, planlessly, each new boom partly or altogether obliterating the idiosyncrasy of its predecessor.

March 19, 1964 issue

Jason Epstein

Up with Downtown

Mike Wallace’s vision for New York is as a city on a hill for the twenty-first century—a city committed to social justice, sustainable growth, and general welfare.

December 19, 2002 issue

Paul Goldberger

He’ll Take Manhattan

Rem Koolhaas rhapsodizes on New York City’s built theatricality and its “culture of congestion,” but he does not reckon on their costs.

June 14, 1979 issue

Martin Filler

Times Square Reborn

A quietly brilliant reconfiguration of Times Square shows how much can be achieved in city planning without gigantic financial outlays and dire social displacements.

June 7, 2017

The Latest

Alan Rusbridger

Two Centuries of ‘The Guardian’

There have been both lean and comfortable times over the decades, but the paper has held its editorial nerve.

May 27, 2021 issue

Tim Flannery

Why Did They Vanish?

Recent advancements in archaeology and genetics have granted us previously unimaginable insights into Neanderthal life.

May 13, 2021 issue

Hilton Als

Remembrance of Things Past

Catherine Opie is interested in where her subjects are on the inside at the moment she’s taking a photograph.

May 13, 2021 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Ancient Egypt for the Egyptians

Europeans made—and carried away—many of the most famous discoveries of the “Golden Age of Egyptology,” but Egyptians today are beginning to reclaim their own past.

May 13, 2021 issue

Erica Armstrong Dunbar

A Praise House of Many Mansions

In a book and documentary series, Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers a wide-ranging tour of Black religion in America.

April 29, 2021 issue

Magda Teter

When Poverty Became Profane

Two recent books, by Debra Kaplan and Natan Meir, examine poverty and charity in European Jewish communities, looking at how a marginalized minority dealt with the problems of destitution and social welfare during periods of rapid change.

April 29, 2021 issue