Ideas

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Real Misfits in Real Gardens

The Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s films often focus on incongruous moments of enchantment within communities living at the margins of society.

February 13, 2025 issue

Blair McClendon

It’s Technicolor

Alvin Ailey is one of those artists, like Picasso and Faulkner, whose name is shorthand for a whole field.

February 13, 2025 issue

Andrew Butterfield

A Half-Century of Artistic Genius

For two generations Sienese painters and sculptors engaged in a nonstop flurry of experimentation and innovation.

February 13, 2025 issue

James Shapiro

Rebels Without a Cause

In Sam Gold’s Romeo + Juliet, the lovers’ headlong rush into marriage is in tension throughout with the surprising regression to childhood that characterizes so much of the production.

January 16, 2025 issue

Sarah L. Kaufman

Limitless Space, Endless Motion

When the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky first saw a tape of Balanchine’s Apollo, he watched in disbelief. Here was elegance without exaggeration, tension and beauty without stagy excess.

January 16, 2025 issue

Adam Hochschild

Evolution in the Dock

In her new book, Brenda Wineapple brings to life one of the most inflamed chapters in the history of America’s culture wars: the Scopes trial of 1925.

January 16, 2025 issue

Rachel Donadio

Unsinkable Paris

The spirit of celebration on the streets of Paris during the Olympics was all the more meaningful to those of us who had lived through so many of the city’s darker recent chapters.

January 16, 2025 issue

Trevor Jackson

‘Never Too Much’

If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?

January 16, 2025 issue

Great Lives

Marie-Antoinette; unfinished portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1791–1792

Lynn Hunt

Marie Antoinette: Why Was She So Hated?

How Marie Antoinette tried to save the monarchy.

November 5, 2020 issue

Fintan O’Toole

A Moral Witness

Martha Gellhorn’s letters to her lovers and intimate friends involve a remarkable feat of reportage on the war within Gellhorn herself

October 8, 2020 issue

Michael Gorra

Young Woman from the Provinces

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work

February 27, 2020 issue

More in Biography & Memoir

A Bestiary

Tim Flannery

Man’s Biggest Friend

The origins of the elephant–human relationship date back into prehistory.

November 21, 2019 issue

Wonderpus octopus, Lembeh Strait, Indonesia

Caspar Henderson

Octopus: The Footed Void

The closer you look at an octopus, the more you see.

April 30, 2013

Robert O. Paxton

Intrepid Navigators

Migration’s demands on birds are as daunting mentally as they are physically.

February 25, 2021 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Requiem for a Heavyweight

In Fathoms, Rebecca Giggs tries to comprehend the fact that whales now literally embody their increasingly polluted world.

August 19, 2021 issue

Desmond Morris

CATS

To enjoy the company of a cat, we must be prepared to forgo our dominant pack leader role, and adopt a more modest position.

November 3, 1994 issue

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Horse Sense

A book for naturalists or cowboys, bluegrass aristocrats or race-track touts, distinguished academics or little girls gone horse-crazy, and all readers with an interest in Equus caballus.

May 15, 1997 issue

Abortion

Liza Batkin

Men Explain Abortion Drugs to the FDA

In a Texas lawsuit, Christian medical organizations are asking a hand-picked judge to make the FDA rescind its approval of mifepristone. They might succeed.

March 7, 2023

Felicia Kornbluh

The Grassroots of ‘Roe’

My mother’s part in the 1970 repeal of New York’s abortion law is a lesson for today’s activists: all politics is local.

January 16, 2023

Jamieson Webster

A Child Is Being Aborted

Psychoanalysis helped me make sense of my desire to have a child. It also exposes the fantasies at the root of the fear of abortion.

September 21, 2022

Charlotte Shane

‘Can You Describe This?’

Every week that I handle calls on the abortion fund’s hotline is a week spent confronting the mundanity of the struggle for dignity.

May 8, 2022

The Latest

Jerome Groopman

Measles Gone Wild

During a burgeoning measles outbreak, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has continued to make contradictory remarks, publicly endorsing the measles vaccine while raising doubts about its safety.

May 15, 2025 issue

Fara Dabhoiwala

Charting an Unheroic Past

With her densely textured, ambitious, and deeply collaborative scholarship, the historian Catherine Hall has transformed public discourse about slavery.

April 24, 2025 issue

Vivian Gornick

The 176-Year Argument

At the University of Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City College of New York all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?

April 24, 2025 issue

Francisco Cantú

Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration

The Afterlife Is Letting Go, Brandon Shimoda’s book about how survivors and descendants of the United States’ Japanese internment camps try to keep their families’ histories alive, is also a look at the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

April 24, 2025 issue

Jenny Uglow

Lunar Myths and Mysteries

Two new books explore our growing scientific understanding of the moon as well as its powerful appeal to the imagination.

April 24, 2025 issue

Erin Maglaque

Vexed by Sex

A new history of how Christianity has met the problem of desire argues for more flexibility in proclamations on gender and sexuality.

April 24, 2025 issue

David Cole

Academic Freedom in Peril

Two books by leading First Amendment scholars offer a timely defense of the principle that politicians should not try to control what universities and professors teach their students.

April 24, 2025 issue

Benjamin Nathans

The Enigma of George Kennan

Frank Costigliola’s biography of George Kennan explores the contrast between the supreme confidence of his policy prescriptions and the perpetual turbulence of his inner life.

April 24, 2025 issue