Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Society & Culture

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

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

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

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

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

Nathaniel Rich

Rolling Along

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

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

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

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

Mark O’Connell

Uncanny Planet

A new collection of essays by Nathaniel Rich argues that there is no going back to whatever might be meant by “nature.”

July 22, 2021 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Freedom for Sale

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

July 22, 2021 issue

Peter C. Baker

Death Drives

Pedestrian fatalities are rising dramatically in the US, and Angie Schmitt’s Right of Way gives a rare look at why and what might be done about it.

July 22, 2021 issue

Josephine Quinn

Ravenna Between East and West

It has been a barbarian city, a holy city, a woman’s city, and a city ruled by Romans, Huns, Goths, Greeks, and bishops.

July 22, 2021 issue

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

Anne Diebel

Cubicle Messiah

WeWork was hurtling into the future, with Adam Neumann leading the way. What led to its dramatic collapse?

July 22, 2021 issue

David A. Bell

A Haunted Patrimony

Through their art collecting wealthy Jews staked a claim to being French, but the nation they loved savagely betrayed them.

July 1, 2021 issue

Robert Macfarlane

The Landscapes Inside Us

Our navigational ability as a species is closely connected to our ability to tell stories about ourselves that unfold both backward and forward in time.

July 1, 2021 issue