Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Society & Culture

Namwali Serpell

Black Hole

Black pussy is our absent center. It is everywhere and nowhere on the Internet.

March 26, 2021

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

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

Margaret Eby

The Gourmand’s Way

Along with his celebration of American vernacular cooking, James Beard brought playfulness into the kitchen. But an ethical opportunism is part of his legacy and the culture he helped create.

June 10, 2021 issue

Michelle Chen

Chinatown’s Long Covid

A younger generation tackles the latest, greatest threat to the historic district’s survival.

March 4, 2021

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

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

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

Nathaniel Rich

Rolling Along

The beauty, eccentricity, and precariousness of life on the river side of the New Orleans levees.

October 7, 2021 issue

Peter Brown

The Glories of Aksum

Recent studies of medieval Ethiopia are a timely reminder of a Christianity wider than Europe.

October 7, 2021 issue

Linda Colley

How British Is It?

The Met’s reinstalled British Galleries take a new approach to the question: What is British art and design?

September 23, 2021 issue

Dan Chiasson

Larger Than Life

Nearly sixty years after its founding, Bread and Puppet Theater still has the power to unsettle, despite evoking old battles, old adversaries, and perhaps even lost causes.

September 23, 2021 issue

Anne Enright

The Burden of ‘Yes’

Katherine Angel is part of a new generation of female writers who are revisiting ideas of female submission.

August 19, 2021 issue

Phil Penman

New York, Anew

As the city emerges from long pandemic hibernation, New Yorkers tell how they survived it and what their hopes are for the future.

July 10, 2021

Christine Smallwood

The Power of Questions

Jacqueline Rose’s latest book, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, takes up a subject she has not covered before: gendered abuse and harassment.

July 22, 2021 issue