Madeleine Schwartz

Whack-a-Rat

The rats of Paris have presented their human neighbors with centuries of complex problems, and now face a controversial future.

Macron Unreformed

“Much of the anger about this reform represents other anxieties: increased inequality, the rising cost of living, and a sense that many French people have that if they’re outside of Paris they’re totally cut off.”

Macron’s Bad Math

The French president has appealed to economic necessity as he pushes through his pension plan, but the reform has few supporters among economists.

Generation Mélenchon

A new alliance is attempting to revive the French left by bringing candidates from a range of parties under a single banner.

Macron on the Precipice

French President Emmanuel Macron is favored to win reelection, but his mixed record makes it a close race. If he loses to Marine Le Pen, France’s place in Europe may be radically altered.

Bike Lane to the Élysée

The environmentalist policies of Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, have transformed the capital. Why is her presidential campaign faltering?

A Necessary Detachment

The work of Xiaolu Guo both plays with the globalization of literature and rebukes it.

Criminalizing a Constitutional Right

For many Americans, Roe v. Wade might as well have been overturned already.

Anywhere But Here

Pandemic Journal, March 17–22

Dispatches on the coronavirus outbreak from Madeleine Schwartz in Brooklyn, Anne Enright in Dublin, Joshua Hunt in Busan, Anna Badkhen in Lalibela, Lauren Groff in Gainesville, and more.

The Devourer

Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement.

Inside the Deportation Courts

There is no principle of innocent until proven guilty in immigration court.

How Should a Millennial Be?

The novels of Sally Rooney

The Disillusionist

The violent, emotionally tangled, lushly written work of Elsa Morante

The View from the Attic

Pushing Against the Apocalypse

Lara Feigel’s ‘Free Woman: Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing’

Merkel’s Problem on Her Right

The number of people trying to get to Europe has dropped drastically. Yet, since 2015, fear of a new “wave” of immigrants has shaped German politics.

Notes from the Inside

Rachel Kushner’s ‘The Mars Room’

Germany: With Centrists Like These…

Germany’s political direction depends far more on the two center parties, the SPD and especially the CDU, than the far-right AfD.

Give Birth or Get Out

Jane Poe’s case is the third in a recent disturbing pattern among undocumented minors in custody who have been denied abortions.