Elegy IV (detail), from the series Arctic Elegy, by DM Witman © The artist. Courtesy Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, New York “Don’t say that he’s hypocritical / Say rather that he’s apolitical,” Tom…

Read more

The corrupt business of deportation

Read more

On the Jesus trilogy

Read more

If it weren’t for the black death, the fourteenth-century merchant Francesco di Marco Datini might have left no trace in history. A workaholic Tuscan with offices from Bruges to Barcelona,…

Read more

Charles Bowden’s borderlands

Read more

On Sylvia Townsend Warner

Read more

Spreading Fires During the Great Kanto Earthquake, a newspaper illustration of the 1855 earthquake in Edo, Japan. Courtesy Special Collections, Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library A metropolis can transform, and even…

Read more

Wordsworth at 250

Read more

Tracing the origins of the German nation

Read more

A Cotton Office in New Orleans, by Edgar Degas. Courtesy Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau, France In 1873, while visiting family in America, Edgar Degas painted a scene from his uncle’s…

Read more

On women’s history and group biography

Read more

How not to write about Andy Warhol

Read more

Discussed in this essay: Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris; Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses; Elizabeth DiSavino’s Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky’s Forgotten Ballad Collector; Percival Everett’s Telephone over chess.…

Read more

Can Kierkegaard tell us how to live?

Read more

On Jacques Tati

Read more

Members of the Moorish Science Temple of America at an annual gathering, 1928 Courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library Last summer, Philadelphia proclaimed…

Read more

On the long shadow of Maoism

Read more

The cold, frenzied genius of Kleist

Read more

The first history of the most remote ocean

Read more

Design for a grotesque mask by Johann Ulrich Stapf © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Witch hunts have always been a tool of those in power. As such, they shed…

Read more

The life of Robert Stone

Read more

There’s much to be said for being maladjusted. More and more, perhaps, as the environment to which one is expected to adjust becomes more ruinous. The climate activist Greta Thunberg…

Read more

The end of a literary marriage

Read more

On the specious new history podcasts

Read more

On the fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti

Read more

On the queen of old Hollywood’s émigrés

Read more

Discussed in this essay: Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 240 pages. $26. Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, by Vincent Brown. Harvard University Press. 336 pages. $35.  Of…

Read more

  Questions about the future of Islam in Europe tend to revolve around “Europeans,” reflexively imagined as native-born and white. If reactionary nationalists fear the influence of an “alien” culture,…

Read more