CATEGORIES
Categories
Claudia Rankine's Quest for Racial Dialogue
Is her focus on the personal out of step with the racial politics of our moment?
Ever Thought About Breaking Free, Abandoning Your Responsabilities, Running Away From Your Life?
Toby Dorr's Great Escape
Looking For Frederick Douglass
How a visit to his birthplace helped me understand this moment in America
What Is MasterClass Actually Selling?
The Ads are everywhere: You can learn to serve like Serena Williams, write like Margaret Atwood, act like Natalie Portman. But what MasterClass really delivers is something altoguether different.
The Mythology Of Racial Progress
Believing that things are always getting better actually makes them worse.
The Relentless Erin Brockovich
She was an early crusader for environmental justice. Today, she’s sounding the alarm louder than ever.
Lying as an Art Form
Elena Ferrante’s new novel about adolescence explores the power of fictions.
Why Is the West So Powerful— And So Peculiar?
Cultural evolutionary theory has a startling answer: a marriage policy first pursued by the Catholic Church a millennium and a half ago.
The Beating Pulse of Donald Judd
I always thought his work was intimidatingly austere, until I discovered the plenitude at its core.
POWER SHORTAGE
Women’s rights are human rights. But rights are nothing without the power to claim them.
Marilynne Robinson's Lonely Souls
Her new novel, the latest installment of her Gilead series, explores the power of love and the legacy of race.
Was Charlotte Dod the Greatest Athlete Ever?
The remarkable career of a Victorian athletic phenom—and the legacy that wasn’t
Protest Works
How the Black Lives Matter demonstrations will shake up the 2020 election—and reshape American politics for a generation to come
What to Do About William Faulkner
A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.
David Coppereld 's Wild Ride
Armando Iannucci’s mad, loving, and brilliant adaptation of Dickens’s novel
Essay – “No Novel About Any Black Woman Could Ever Be the Same After This”
That’s how Toni Morrison described Gayl Jones’s first book in 1975. Jones has published to great acclaim and experienced unspeakable tragedy. Now she is releasing her first novel in more than 20 years.
Anatomy of an American Failure – How the virus won
How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation.
Culture & Critics - “How Did I End Up Like This?”
Seamus Heaney’s journey into darkness
Hygiene is Overrated
But keep washing your hands.
Can An Unlove Child Learn to Love?
Thirty years ago, the world discovered tens of thousands of children warehoused in Romanian orphanages, deprived of human contact and affection. They’re adults now.
FICTION - Deep Cut
“Naw, you don’t have to worry about me,” Thomas said, after his mother had finished her characteristically perfunctory warning to us about drugs, alcohol, and rough-looking types. “Paul thinks he’s cool now, though.” ¶ “Paul, when did this happen?” Mrs. Rickley said. ¶ She wasn’t a hip mom, exactly, but she got points for not caring particularly about what her children or their friends got up to.
POLICE REFORM IS NOT ENOUGH
The moral failure of incremental change
The Collaborators
What causes people to abandon their principles in support of a corrupt regime? And how do they find their way back?
Florida, Man
The dark soul of the Sunshine State
Supermarkets are a miracle
Why did we ever take them for granted?
The Triumph Of The Slob
Keeping a cluttered house has long been considered a little tacky, a little weak … but now it’s looking very wise.
Kevin Kwan – The Shakespeare of Status Anxiety
Kevin Kwan, the author of Crazy Rich Asians, celebrates and skewers the social codes of the wealthy and powerful.
Seamus Heaney – “How Did I End Up Like This?”
Seamus Heaney’s journey into darkness
The Worst Worst Case
The U.S. banking system could be on the cusp of calamity. This time, we might not be able to save it.
Time, Space, and the Virus
How a pandemic transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar