Sections

The Spy

On seeing without being seen

The Tragedy of Volodymyr Zelensky

Beyond the Ukrainian president’s finest hour

Against the Current

Where’s the support for Democratic insurgents?

The Golden Fleece

A historical adventure

Purple Haze

Cannabis returns to Kathmandu

My Generation

Anthem for a forgotten cohort

Waiting for the Lights

The life of an Iranian exile

The Impossible

Lee Friedlander, who is among the most celebrated and quietly innovative living American photographers, is eighty-nine years old and was born in Aberdeen, Washington, a place once nicknamed the “Hell…

Doctor’s Orders

COVID-19 and the new science wars

Who Walks Always Beside You?

A disappearance in Arkansas

Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease

What’s the cost of rolling the genetic dice?

Doing the Work

The Protestant ethic and the spirit of wokeness

Behind the Veil of Indifference

Lessons from a nuclear life

Submersion Journalism

Two thousand feet under the sea in a homemade submarine

In the Glimmer

The good witches of Pennsylvania

Learning to Wait

The original Anthology Film Archives, on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, was designed with high black partitions between each seat, so that viewers could wall themselves in to the screen like…

Time Regained

“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.” I first read the famous opening lines of “Burnt Norton”—the first of T. S. Eliot’s…

Street Life

When Roxy Music was recording “Street Life” for the 1973 album Stranded, they hung a mic out the window of AIR Studios above Oxford Street, but they didn’t like the…

Origin Story

My grandfather was a man who didn’t like to compromise. A rural Welsh boy who had made it to Cambridge University and then on to a career as a scientist,…

What’s Real

In the fall of 2014 I began attending hearings, some of them banal and procedural, others more emotional, for a Los Angeles murder trial that was cranking its way through…

Where Tomorrow Meets Today

“Let me persuade you to come to the place where tomorrow meets today,” a voice-over invites near the beginning of Design for Dreaming, a General Motors promotional film from 1956.…

Disappear Here

There was a football game that afternoon at Buckley and though I can remember who I masturbated about on that early October day (I wrote it down—I kept lists, a…

The Social Body

After he finished medical school, my father left India, moved to the United Kingdom, and became a surgeon in the National Health Service. He specialized in orthopedics, which made Christmas…

Fast vs. Furious

Los Angeles is not “Hollywood,” and those who confuse the two should be banned from visiting. One quarter of California’s forty million residents live in L.A., which is the most…

Exit

In the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as…

Flesheater Blues

A few months ago I introduced a screening of Robert Frank’s rarely shown and somewhat notorious film Cocksucker Blues at a cinema house in Los Angeles. Legally, the film can…

Government Forces

As a small child, I would sometimes sit with my parents in our suburban London living room and watch the six o’clock news on the BBC. One evening, I saw…

Night Watch

When I was a kid, we played a game: would you rather be given eternal happiness or told the secrets of the universe? I always chose secrets. In Eugene, Oregon,…

A Choice We’re Making

On May Day 2000, I participated in a “guerrilla gardening” action in London, digging up Parliament Square to plant crops. It was a utopian gesture—one of many made in those…

Down South

In June 1997, I boarded an all-night bus from the Port Authority to Asheville, North Carolina, with my friend Cynthia. We had no plan but to live there for the…

Tenure Track Attrition

From a meeting in July at Texas A&M University. In May, Kathleen McElroy had accepted a tenured position as the head of the university’s journalism program. The Texas Tribune reported…

Mirror

From Grand Tour, which was published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I offer a friend’s young daughter a leaf of mint just picked, inviting her to smell, when…

Arraigning Cats and Dogs

From petitions to the U.K. parliament since 2020 that have received more than ten thousand signatures, which means the government must formally respond. Make dog theft a criminal offense Make…

The Antiquarian

From Brooklyn Crime Novel, which will be published this month by Ecco. Say a guy, a former Dean Street boy, now resident of an apartment above a bar on Columbia…

Pillory

From the final issue of Freeman’s, which was published this month by Grove Press.  My father worked as an inventory manager at a company that imported erasers and small toy…

Home Improvements

From “Real Estate,” which was published in the Summer 2023 issue of The Dublin Review. the village When I was around twelve, we moved to an estate in Newbridge, which…

Otterfiction

From “An Account of the Otter,” which was published in the Summer 2023 issue of BOMB Magazine. Whereas some people have a passion for sex, my mentor has a passion…

Ball Is Strife

From affidavits filed by residents of Falmouth, Massachusetts, regarding a new pickleball court.  We are of sound mind.  Pre-pickleball, we enjoyed the outside of our home tremendously.  We could be…

Transit Gloria

From an unpublished draft of his memoir. A longtime television critic for Newsday, he died in June at age ninety-three.  During the Great Depression, my father always had a job.…

Führian Slip

From a correction issued by the Hamilton County, Indiana, chapter of Moms for Liberty. THE PARENT BRIGADE PARENT ADVOCACY through UNIFYING, EDUCATING, and EMPOWERING For parental rights at all levels…

Buy Woe Sell High

From a training manual for employees of the real estate investment company HomeVestors of America, which flips houses. Find the Pain. Pain is always a form of motivation. People in…

Easter Morning

From Wave House, which was published in June by Flood Editions. my mother, a near-invalid since she broke her leg, told me she heard singing from her bed upstairs. She’d…

Dreams of My Father

From The Wolves of Eternity, which was published this month by Harvill Secker. That night I dreamt about Dad. I didn’t very often, and when I woke up from the…

No for an Answer

From an interview with the British artist Tracey Emin, conducted by Laura Allsop, which was published in June by AnOther Magazine. laura allsop: Some of the figures in your works…

Read It and Sleep

From Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia, which was published this month by Semiotext(e). Translated from the French. Sleep, sleep, how? The passageway is shut. The door has disappeared. The wall…

Is Liberalism Worth Saving?

The future of an ideal

What’s in a Vote?

Electoral politics in an ailing democracy

Constitution in Crisis

Has America’s founding document become the nation’s undoing?

Stonewall at Fifty

Early in the morning on June 28, 1969, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street, the city’s most popular gay bar. The police had raided Stonewall…

Combat High

America’s addiction to war

City in a Forest

The fight over Atlanta’s new police academy

We Started the Fire

The risks of prescribed burns in a warming climate

Lone on the Range

Prairie madness on the Great Plains

Knights-Errant

Online chess reshapes the game of kings

Come and Get It

A risky invitation to extraterrestrials

No Pain, No Gain

Pandemic bonds and the privatization of public health

Lost Cause

How police violence disappears from death certificates

The Hothouse

Tracking the past and future spread of ragweed allergies

Your Own Devices

The Right to Repair movement gains ground

A Firm Hand

McKinsey goes to Rikers Island

Divine Logic

Kurt Gödel’s last proof

The Big Frieze

Cartoonist Ben Garrison’s MAGA in winter

Measureless to Man

The art of mapping the underground

Negative I.D.

Proving you’re safe to travel

Shelter in Place

The democratic designs of J.B.S. Haldane

The Year of the Rabbit

I’m going to take a minute now to see if I can get my dates straight. Peter and I were married in June 1962. In early December, Peter told me…

Painting of Hannah

The Return

My friend was a widow, not really old but already a widow twice. You think of Oscar Wilde’s wisecrack. To lose one husband may be regarded as a misfortune, to…

The Castle of Rose Tellin

Pen remembers it all. It was 1968. They took a family vacation to Sanibel. Pen’s father drove the station wagon. He held the wheel tightly and gritted his teeth and…

Seeing Through Maps

Photographs by Lisa Elmaleh for Harper’s Magazine © The artist I was splitting wood at sunset when the cat jumped up on the chopping block in front of me, arched…

The Conversion of the Jews

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,      Ghetto and Judenstrass, in murk and mire; Taught in the school of patience to endure      The life of anguish and the death…

Recovery

April said that when she got healthy—if she did, she said, if—she wanted to have Julia’s body. It was the ideal, April said, curvy but still thin enough, I should…

Triptych

In an effort to replenish its anemic membership with younger blood, the New Amsterdam Club has, among other measures, relaxed its dress code, allowed the use of cell phones, and…

Lingua Franca

Some of the guys joined back up for Korea, to be Marines once more, to sail back across the Pacific Ocean and kill different Asians. Bob considered the prospect, but…

The Big Quit

A departure yard in Chicago (detail), December 1942, by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Leave the two men stranded along the railroad tracks outside Chicago,…

On a Winter’s Night

My father told me this story. He said it happened one Christmas Eve many years ago. A boy was walking alone alongside a highway and saw the lights of the…

The Loud Parts

Angie said through convoluted gasps brought on by racing Adderall thoughts that Saint died at his desk so Jean could get his job. Jean insisted between tangents of laughter that…

Siberia

I have no pictures of people on my phone anymore, she said, only pictures of prose. When did I become a misanthrope? The last time he saw her, she was…

Two Lunches

You’re seldom suspicious when you’re happy, and so I didn’t realize that the whole awful business was about to start when Vita said, “It’s been ages since you had lunch…

Violet Swans

Crooked November moon. The sky’s belly, torn open. The snow, spilling out and coming down. The first snow. Onto the midnight streets of Moscow. “Ash.” Wind. Flakes. Blizzard, whiteout. “You…

All the Images Will Disappear

On Annie Ernaux’s spectacular impersonality

New Books

A few years ago I found myself close to an episode of tabloid intrigue. A friend’s uncle was accused of murdering his wife in a rich Connecticut town. He attempted suicide…

Come as You Are

On Zadie Smith and the Gen X novel

New Books

New Books

From Churn to Burn

Colson Whitehead’s half-true Harlem

Do Cartels Exist?

A revisionist view of the drug wars

New Books

Blue Self-Portrait, by Arnold Schoenberg, circa 1910. Courtesy the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna The Lexicon of Musical Invective may be the only music reference book compiled mainly out of spite.…

New Books

Human Lock, by Vojtěch Kovařík. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paolo, Brussels, New York City The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Kairos (New Directions, $25.95), refers…

An Anthropologist of Filth

On Chuck Berry

New Books

The novel form is capacious and elastic, in some instances deployed like a magnifying glass on a water droplet, and in others as a panoramic lens to encompass a vast…

Time Is a Violent Stream

On losing a father and finding Stoicism

New Books

Left: “Milan Kundera, Prague, 1969,” by Gisèle Freund © The artist. IMEC/Fonds MCC/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York City. Courtesy Galerie Franz Swetec, Düsseldorf. Right: “Rising of Rudé právo,” by…

Signs and Wonders

Charles Portis and the art of getting out in time

History’s Fool

The long century of Ernst Jünger

Theme and Variations

Hex Signs

1 Across

Plus Fours

Foursomes

Questions! Questions!

No Typos

True Words

Sixes and Sevens (and Twelves)

Diptych

Dedicated Dodecahedron: Holiday Edition

Logophilia

Gentlemen’s Agreement

Yo Ho Ho

Mixed Bag

Findings

“Holding, Japanese Cypress, 1,” “Holding, Japanese Cypress, 2,” and “Holding, Japanese Cypress, 3,” photographs by Melanie Schiff © The artist. Courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles   Global…

Findings

The door to the other world is always open, by Aaron Gilbert © The artist. Courtesy the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles   The rate of society’s moral…

Findings

Strata-25E, Strata-26B, and Strata-25C, watercolors by Mikael Hallstrøm © The artist Australian scientists from the Whales and Climate Research Program asserted that whales cannot, after all, significantly mitigate atmospheric carbon.…

Findings

Betty 11 and Betty 10, knit installations by Mulyana, whose work was on view in April at the USC Fisher Museum of Art, in Los Angeles © The artist. Courtesy…

Findings

To be titled, a painting by Marc Padeu, whose work was on view in April at Peres Projects, in Milan, Italy. Courtesy the artist and Peres Projects Five-year-olds will believe…

Findings

Artificial intelligence researchers estimated that, among categories of domestic labor, grocery shopping is the most automatable and childcare the least.

Findings

“99 Moons No. 151,” “99 Moons No. 83,” “99 Moons No. 60,” by Claire A. Warden, whose work is on view as part of the exhibition Under the Sun and…

Findings

I Might Just Listen, It Won’t Be Good, and How Did I Miss That?, miniature sculptures by Lydia Ricci, whose work is on view at the Berman Museum of Art,…

Findings

Findings

Atmospheric warming is shrinking the diurnal temperature range, the septic systems of Nags Head are failing as sea levels rise, and PFAS are damaging the immune systems of Cape Fear…

Findings

Let it Rice, Let it Rice, Let it Rice and Stuck in an Egg Tart, paintings by Chang Ya Chin, whose work is on view this month with Half Gallery…

Findings

“Final Shot,” a photograph by Evan Robidoux, whose work was on view in September at Pace Gallery, in New York City © The artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York City…

Findings

The increasing conservatism that comes with age is largely a consequence of raising children; small children, but not macaques and capuchins, can perceive faces in inanimate objects; and psychopathic traits,…

Findings

“Sundial with Prism,” “Sundial with Compass,” and “A Variety of Colors Created with the Shadow of a Prism #4 (Color Separation with Three Black and White Paper Negatives),” photographs by…

Findings

Photographs by Brenda Biondo, whose work is on view through September with the Center for Fine Art Photography at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art at Colorado State University, in…