James Fenton Catching the Moment John Singer Sargent saw into the souls of his models, whether they were society women, nude men, or lower-class Venetians. How did he do it? May 9, 2024 issue
Darryl Pinckney ‘Who Shall Describe Beauty?’ The Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition reveals the eclecticism of black artistic practices and styles. May 9, 2024 issue
Jenny Uglow The Volcano Lovers For travelers in the Romantic period, Mount Vesuvius was an object of scientific curiosity, a political allegory, and a touchstone of the sublime. April 18, 2024 issue
Peter Brown Charged Wonders An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art aims to give voice and density to the Christian cultures in Africa with which Byzantium interacted over the many centuries of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. February 8, 2024 issue
Geoffrey O’Brien A Craving for Crime Perhaps only after a lifetime of immersion in crime fiction can one begin to wonder what all those stories have really imparted. February 8, 2024 issue
J. Hoberman ‘Kish Mir in Tuchus!’ Before his violent early death at twenty-five, the Jewish Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum assembled a body of confrontational drawings. February 25, 2024
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
Jenny Uglow In Search of the Rare and Strange In Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, Ulinka Rublack traces the global connections of the merchants who were the creative agents of the European art market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. February 22, 2024 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
Jeremiah Moss The Death and Life of a Great American Building As affordable rents disappear, the mental health of New Yorkers increasingly becomes yet another tale of two cities. Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city? March 7, 2018
Jason Epstein New York: The Prophet “The war over the monstrous Lower Manhattan Expressway, a projected ten-lane elevated link…connecting the Holland Tunnel to the East River bridges, would be long and painful. Jacobs and the neighborhood coalition prevailed. But the nine-year struggle…convinced Jacobs that if she wanted to write other books she must leave New York.” August 13, 2009 issue
Lucy Sante My Lost City “Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.” November 6, 2003 issue
Adam Thirlwell A Sternly Witty Sensualist Karl Lagerfeld used reference and precise technique to elevate decoration to the level of a principle. August 15, 2024 issue
Colin Grant Yearning for Redemption Kingsley Ben-Adir’s performance as Bob Marley in One Love is seductive, but in treating the singer as a savior, the film loses sight of his complexity. August 15, 2024 issue
James Romm Frozen For centuries explorers risked their lives seeking passage through the Arctic. A recent exhibition and book juxtapose the region’s mythologized past with its uncertain future. July 20, 2024
Sam Huber Circles ’Neath Your Eyes The men and women in Lucinda Williams’s songs struggle to turn their injuries into something they can live with. July 11, 2024
Michael Hofmann Order 1, Chaos 0 Football is a crazed bid for compensation, for escape, for some transcendent atavistic loyalty. June 29, 2024
Martin Filler A Long Exposure The pioneering French photographer Hippolyte Bayard has lived in the shadows of his more famous peers. A new exhibition brings him into the light. June 22, 2024
J. Hoberman Polish Compassion Green Border is the filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s latest confrontation with her country’s brutal history. June 20, 2024
Nikil Saval Nowhere But Up In the wake of the 1964 Harlem riots, June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s plan to redesign the neighborhood suggested new possibilities for urban life. June 8, 2024
Kathryn Hughes Written by Paw In novels and magazines from the turn of the last century, cats started speaking their minds. What if they were talking about us? June 4, 2024
Martin Filler Up on the Roof Carlos de Beistegui’s Parisian penthouse apartment, designed by Le Corbusier, was the product of two supreme egotists squaring off against each other. June 20, 2024 issue