Easy Chair

Forget About It

by Corey Robin,

In the uneasy months following 9/11, the Bush Administration provoked a minor controversy when it announced the name of a new office dedicated to protecting the United States from terrorism…

Nobody Knows

by Rebecca Solnit,

When I was eighteen, I spent several months working as a bus girl at a diner. It was a cheerful-looking place, facing San Francisco Bay. The kitchen was L-shaped: the…

The Uncertainty Principle

by Walter Kirn,

The first year of the Trump presidency is behind us. The unimaginable has become the historical. But time, the reputed healer of all wounds, has somehow only aggravated this one.…

Strandings

by Rebecca Solnit,

The footage is eerie, a plunge through a dim world of lush seaweed, the underwater forests of the treeless Arctic. Objects swim into view: a bell, a small fish, a…

On the Corner of Myth and Main

by Walter Kirn,

There was a time when I didn’t know that I lived in Middle America. When I was very young, growing up in eastern Minnesota, I thought I was just an…

Preaching to The Choir

by Rebecca Solnit,

Once, on a river-rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, I traveled with a charming, good-humored man who happened to run an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He liked…

The Spaceship and the Moose

by Walter Kirn,

A dozen of us sat and stood around the campfire, guests at a lodge in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. My wife and I were there to hike and sleep and celebrate…

Now and Then

by Rebecca Solnit,

The present is by common definition the instant between the not yet and the already, a moment as narrow and treacherous as a tightrope. But you might instead define it…

Apocalypse Always

by Walter Kirn,

As a teenager in the Mormon Church, I was led to believe I might live to see the world end — the fallen world of sin and imperfection, that is, which…

Occupied Territory

by Rebecca Solnit,

One morning, as I walked on the quiet, mostly wooded King Mountain trail above San Francisco Bay, a dog not much smaller than I and possessed of much sharper teeth…

Shopping-Mall Time Machine

by Walter Kirn,

I started hearing it about two years ago, and then I seemed to hear it constantly: people in their late teens and early twenties complaining, quite sincerely, that they felt…

Facing the Furies

by Rebecca Solnit,

In 1979, a catchy Kenny Rogers song called “Coward of the County” made it to the top of the country charts. It’s about a man named Tommy, whose father, a…

You Can Run …

by Walter Kirn,

I have a theory — not a very good one — that the reason Google is so hot to develop self-driving cars is that time behind the wheel is the…

Tyranny of the Minority

by Rebecca Solnit,

Think of our democracy as a house we built in 1776, big enough only for Christian, property-owning white men. Over the next two centuries, various groups struggled to make it…

A Grim Fairy Tale

by Walter Kirn,

So, it happened. Mythmaking beat math. Drama put data in its place. A candidate who styled himself a renegade outsider has become the forty-fifth president. It’s almost as though a…

The Monument Wars

by Rebecca Solnit,

For years, whenever I was in New Orleans, I used to run past an equestrian statue just outside the voluptuously green City Park. Though it is situated at a major…

Mourning in America

by James Marcus,

A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and…

Standing Rock Speaks

by Walter Kirn,

Only as a story will this make sense. One morning in August, craving company, I walked around the corner from my apartment in Livingston, Montana, and sat down at the…

Coming Apart

by Rebecca Solnit,

In early 2015, fire ravaged a three-story building at the corner of 22nd and Mission in San Francisco. The blaze killed Mauricio Orellana, an immigrant from El Salvador, and destroyed…

Psychedelic Trap

by Walter Kirn,

Driving into Cleveland on a warm July Saturday to secure my press credentials for the Republican National Convention, I get a text from a friend in California, a guy in…

Giantess

by Rebecca Solnit,

The radical is so often imagined as the marginal that sometimes the truly subversive escapes detection just by showing up in a tuxedo instead of a T-shirt or a ski…

Atlas Aggregated

by Walter Kirn,

No social encounter delights me more than meeting a doctor at a cocktail party. In clinical settings, doctors tend to be guarded and aloof. Catch one with a whiskey in…

The Ideology of Isolation

by Rebecca Solnit,

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that…

The Improbability Party

by Walter Kirn,

I like to think I’m unique. Don’t you? Complicated. Surprising. Unpredictable. I like to think that people who’ve only just met me or who know only the basic facts about…

The Habits of Highly Cynical People

by Rebecca Solnit,

On April 24, 1916 — Easter Monday — Irish republicans in Dublin and a handful of other places staged an armed rebellion against British occupation. At the time, the British…

Crossing the Valley

by Walter Kirn,

Like campaigning politicians, pornographers — who are also in the business of galvanizing tired nervous systems — face one problem that never goes away: cutting through the numbness caused by…

Bird in a Cage

by Rebecca Solnit,

There are two things I think about nearly every time I row out into San Francisco Bay. One is a passage from Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain, in which he…

Rule, Britannica

by John Crowley,

They look like a segment of Borges’s Library of Babel: twenty-four volumes almost uniform in bulk (a thousand pages each, give or take a few), identically bound in a reddish-brown…

Everything That Rises

by John Crowley,

I have come to perceive a cosmos filled with superintelligent beings — a virtually infinite number of them, whose minds have transcended their earthbound bodies and are independent of any…

Power in Paris

by Rebecca Solnit,

Can the earth be saved by bureaucrats in long meetings, reciting jargon and acronyms while surrounded by leaning towers of documents? That is what’s supposed to happen in France this…

From the Archive

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Forget About It

Nobody Knows

The Uncertainty Principle

Strandings

On the Corner of Myth and Main

Preaching to The Choir

The Spaceship and the Moose

Now and Then

Apocalypse Always

Occupied Territory

Shopping-Mall Time Machine

Facing the Furies

You Can Run …

Tyranny of the Minority

A Grim Fairy Tale

The Monument Wars

Mourning in America

Standing Rock Speaks

Coming Apart

Psychedelic Trap

Giantess

Atlas Aggregated

The Ideology of Isolation

The Improbability Party

The Habits of Highly Cynical People

Crossing the Valley

Bird in a Cage

Rule, Britannica

Everything That Rises

Power in Paris