Essays

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

Patriarchal Bargains

In her long-out-of-print study of conservative gender politics, Andrea Dworkin reflected on how right-wing women seek safety and status within a movement that demeans them.

February 26, 2025

‘Life, Work, and Architecture’

Elizabeth Mock, whose exhibitions on domestic architecture thrilled midcentury museumgoers, believed that contemporary design should be for everyone.

February 5, 2025

On Leverett Pond

For decades I have thought back to a moment of terror I felt one Christmas Eve nearly fifty years ago. 

December 24, 2024

Captive Minds

Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History.

September 30, 2010 issue

Ill Fares the Land

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.

April 29, 2010 issue

The New Old Nationalism

Everywhere there has been a growing absorption in what Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.” None of this began recently, born again as it were in 1989. Nationalism, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, is not “resurgent”—it never died.

May 26, 1994 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