Essays

‘Illness and Its Very Concept’

Surveying a century of political struggles over medicine and psychiatry, a recent book foregrounds a West German collective that sought to create a radical, patient-led form of health care.

May 2, 2025

Mornings with Murray

New York City always got the towering journalist Murray Kempton at full sail.

April 27, 2025

Spaghetti Underground

The MTA’s new redesign of the New York City subway map is the latest of many attempts to capture the sprawling network on paper.

April 18, 2025

Single-Player Politics

Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of a health care CEO was conceived—and received—as a move within a game of symbols.

March 16, 2025

The Instrumentalist

At the heart of the film Tár is a conductor who cannot see beyond her generation’s field of vision.

January 19, 2023 issue

In Defense of Fiction

We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it.

October 24, 2019 issue

On Optimism and Despair

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities.

December 22, 2016 issue

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

The photographer Ming Smith’s pictures of Sun Ra from 1978 beautifully capture his energy.

July 23, 2020 issue

The Banality of Empathy

Narrative is an incredible vehicle for virtual experience—we think and feel with characters. It simulates empathy, so we believe it stimulates it. But if witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?

March 2, 2019

Glossing Africa

Whenever African writers are on a panel together, we are asked about the continent as a whole. When African writers get together on our own, we talk about glossaries.

August 21, 2017