“This time is different.” With Donald Trump’s second term off to a roaring, snorting start—a furious dust cloud of ICE raids and ICE-raid photo ops, tariffs announced and then paused,…

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They make a wilderness, and they call it peace. —Tacitus, Agricola Liberal internationalism died in the ruins of Gaza and Beirut. Donald Trump’s return to office has only put a…

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William Dean Howells called it his “Uneasy Chair.” Lewis H. Lapham thought it “a column always grotesquely misnamed.” Bernard DeVoto simply wanted to do something else—a books section—and tried to fob…

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How does History move? A generation ago, in the Nineties, it seemed to have forgotten how: perhaps, as Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, History was on a journey, or…

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I’ve written in many places, some wonderful, others makeshift or uncomfortable. I’ve written on trains and in hotel rooms, at ergonomically perfect desks and on laptops balanced on my knees.…

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“The American political scene,” wrote Perry Anderson in 2013, “is conventionally depicted in high colour.” According to conventional—that is, liberal—observers in the Bush and Obama years, America “cartwheeled from brutish…

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For all those involved in the publication and dissemination of ideas, freedom of expression is the foundation on which our work depends. Like many writers, I have campaigned to defend…

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On a damp, gray afternoon in April, I took my daughter with me to vote in the New York Democratic primary. After a long Tuesday, she was keen to get…

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On March 14, 2010, the artist Marina Abramovic sat down at a small table in the center of a gallery in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Visitors were invited…

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“How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who are outside them,” lamented Marian Evans in 1856. She had reason to feel she knew better. The…

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In bookstores in Rome, you can buy a poster headed, in English, i have a dream. It has nothing to do with Martin Luther King Jr. or the civil-rights struggle, instead…

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On the Friday night before New Year’s Eve, my boyfriend and I were in line for the toilets at the techno club Berghain, in Berlin, discussing Buddhism. I’m usually skeptical…

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If you had asked ten-year-old me about my favorite author, I would have replied unhesitatingly that it was J.R.R. Tolkien. The experience of reading The Lord of the Rings had been…

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A French activist I know, a person with a flair for assailing the idiocies of modern life, someone who pines, though not romantically, for a trapdoor to a better world,…

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For some months I’ve been living in Rome, up on the hill called the Gianicolo, which slopes down to the western bank of the Tiber. In antiquity it was the…

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Al Gore once leaned in close, in a kitchen, late at night, at a party at a film festival, as someone snapped a photo of us. I never circulated it;…

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Some years ago, before I became an American citizen, I held a visa that prompted immigration officials to quiz me about my work. These exchanges often went badly. If you…

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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…

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“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…

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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…

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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,…

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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…

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“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.…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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