International

Whose Constitution, Whose Democracy?

Many opponents of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul have called for Israel to finally draft a constitution, but any serious attempt will mean choosing between a democratic state and one that privileges Jewish citizens above all others.

May 11, 2023 issue

Ian Johnson

Loot Under the Lindens

The museums in Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum fall short in their efforts to explain that many of the objects on display were plundered.

May 25, 2023 issue

Howard W. French

The Creation of Nigeria

Britain’s consolidation of Nigeria as a single colony has been the source of most of the major political conflicts that have roiled the country since independence.

June 8, 2023 issue

Timothy Garton Ash

Yearning to Breathe Free

The opening of the Berlin Wall was a one-in-a-million piece of historical luck.

May 11, 2023 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Golden Coats, Sacred Spoons

Most of the coronation ceremony is a series of relatively recent inventions, a charade of historical continuity.

May 7, 2023

Yasmine El Rashidi

Stories Adrift

The crux of Netflix’s melodrama The Swimmers, a biopic of two Syrian refugees who pursued Olympic stardom, is everything it leaves unsaid.

May 9, 2023

Carol Schaeffer, photographs by Alex McBride

‘A Book is a Quiet Weapon’

Across Ukraine, libraries devastated by the war are culling their collections of Russian-language books and Russian literature.

April 21, 2023

Madeleine Schwartz

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.

March 26, 2023

Covid-19 Around the World

Didier William: Dancing, Pouring, Crackling and Mourning, 2015

Edwidge Danticat

Mourning in Place

It’s hard to figure out how to mourn during a pandemic. Our mourning rituals have all been disrupted or taken away.

September 24, 2020 issue

First responders at the Riverside University Health Systems Medical Center, Moreno Valley, California, May 15, 2020

Timothy Snyder

What Ails America

Although I did not understand this then, I had a severe infection in my liver. I was in a condition known as sepsis; death was close.

September 3, 2020

A man holding a painting of Didier Raoult, the French medical researcher promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19, during a show of support for health care workers in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Mandé, May 2020

Rachel Donadio

France: After Lockdown, the Street

Over the course of a long, strange April—during which France recorded nearly 20,000 Covid-19 deaths—something had shifted.

July 23, 2020 issue

The Latest

David Shulman

A Bitter Season in the West Bank

The war in Gaza has provided Israeli settlers fresh opportunity and impunity. I see entire villages fleeing in panic.

December 21, 2023 issue

Ludwika Włodek

Waiting for a New Poland

Five weeks after the opposition won Poland’s legislative elections, its supporters are looking ahead to the country’s future.

November 24, 2023

Sulaiman Khatib

Combatants for Peace

We are a group of former Israeli soldiers and formerly imprisoned Palestinians. Our work is a model for the nonviolent way forward.

November 23, 2023

Omer Bartov, et al.

An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory

Appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.

November 20, 2023

Perry Link

A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China

Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow, a fictionalized account of the life of the actress Sun Weishi, depicts the hypocrisy of the Communist elites and the fate of those who embraced new ideals after the revolution.

December 7, 2023 issue