Society & Culture

‘What We Want Is to Start a Revolution’

Formed in Greenwich Village in 1912 for “women who did things—and did them openly,” the Heterodoxy Club laid the groundwork for a century of American feminism.

August 18, 2022 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Exhausting All Possibilities

The video game The Stanley Parable is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.

August 18, 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

James Romm

Kings of the Universe

Two exhibitions at the Getty Villa explore the links between the Assyrian and the Persian Empires, which both revolved around powerful monarchs.

July 21, 2022 issue

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

Hannah Zeavin

In the Flickering Light

Posing for photographs with one’s television used to be a surprisingly common practice.

July 26, 2022

Nawal Arjini

Democracy in Concrete

An exhibition of postcolonial architecture in South Asia looks back with nostalgia at modernism’s promise of social progress.

June 26, 2022

Erica X Eisen

Memories of the Metaverse

Was Chris Marker’s romance with the online platform Second Life a departure from his creative and political aims, or the consummation of them?

June 7, 2022

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

Jenny Uglow

Silences and Scars

Two new books on Berlin track the city through decades of growth, economic desperation, artistic innovation, Nazi terror, political division, and reunification.

October 20, 2022 issue

Mary Wellesley

Lice and Licentiousness

Hair in the medieval period was a marker of identity, a symbol of power, and a focus of erotic interest, freighted with religious significance.

October 20, 2022 issue

Larry Wolff

The Struggle Over Verdi

The mood of urgency and unease in La Forza del Destino—the opening performance of this year’s Parma Verdi Festival—also hangs over Italy ahead of Sunday’s national elections.

September 24, 2022

Hilton Als

Godard’s Women

Cinema is a gift in that it allows for exposition—the betrayal of secrets—in frame after frame, actress by actress.

September 23, 2022

Michael Gorra

Corrections of Taste

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries traces a shift in English studies in which close attention to language, rather than literary history, became the paradigm for criticism.

October 6, 2022 issue

Leslie T. Chang

Little Town on the Prairie

Liang Hong’s best-selling account of returning to her home village inspired an outpouring of Chinese nonfiction about the country’s immense social changes.

October 6, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

Rome Was His Laboratory

By the time of his death in 1729, the astronomer, historian, and archaeologist Francesco Bianchini had been an aide to three popes and confidant to one Polish princess and an exiled king.

October 6, 2022 issue

Joe Bucciero

Clear but Not Cold

An exhibition at the Centre Pompidou explores the contradictions of a Weimar-era cultural movement that strove for fidelity “to positive palpable reality.”

August 25, 2022

Namwali Serpell

‘She’s Capital!’

The figure of the Whore is everywhere in art, her beauty to be gazed upon and admired. With the Internet, has she finally found her own artistic terrain?

July 21, 2022 issue