Table of Contents

We the undersigned are scholars of the Holocaust and antisemitism from different institutions. We write to express our dismay and disappointment at

Louise Glück’s poems tend to start up close: there is no scene-setting, no “driving to the interior” (Elizabeth Bishop’s phrase). Instead a voice

In an effort to persuade the American people that the president has done nothing wrong, Trump and his supporters have blamed those they identify as their political adversaries—from President Barack...

a poem

No regular reader of Cormac McCarthy will be surprised to find that The Passenger begins with a corpse. Or two corpses, really, one of which has gone

Corruption is a process, as well as a set of practices. It involves gradual changes in ethical and behavioral norms that make actions that were once considered illegal or immoral seem acceptable—wh...

Joan Didion (1934–2021) was the author, most recently, of Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking, among seven other works of nonfiction. Her five novels include A Book of Common Prayer and...

Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor

As the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China approached, commentary in the English-language press about the future of the colony was written in

I have closed novels and stared at their back covers for a long moment and felt known in a way I cannot honestly say I have felt known by many real-life interactions with human beings, or even by...

Trump and his Republican wrecking crew are ripping out the floorboards under the government ethics program. His administration has taught us the difference between theory and application and shown us...

The Birthday of the World is Ursula K. Le Guin's tenth collection of stories. In it she demonstrates once again why she is the reigning queen of...but

Will Trump be able to put in place all the worst ideas he tossed out so cavalierly on the campaign trail? Building a wall; banning and deporting Muslims; ending Obamacare; reneging on climate change...

There are many William Blakes, but mine arrived with the tigers in the 1960s. The first line I ever read by Blake was not in a book, but laid out in thick white paint (or should I say illuminated)...

The US has engaged in many armed conflicts, but three of them have never ended: the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and the so-called war on terror. Their toxic residues flow from different directions...

The chaos and cruelty unleashed in late June by the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which wiped out a

What kind of a problem is a library? It’s clear that for many people it is not a problem at all, only a kind of obsolescence. At the extreme pole of this view is the technocrat’s total faith: with...

In September, The New York Times reported on a concerning surge in Russian ransomware attacks against the United States, including “against small towns,

The United Nations has assessed that 276 million people worldwide today are “severely food insecure.” Forty million are in “emergency” conditions, one

Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization would have you believe that the forthcoming decision to overrule Roe v. Wade

W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American sociologist and historian and a cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was fond

Donald Trump has an instinct for doing violence to language. Using words to lie destroys language. Using words to cover up lies, however subtly, destroys language. Validating incomprehensible drivel...

A formerly moderate, pro-civil rights, pro-abortion rights, reform-minded politician has enabled a president who not only has set back race relations, but has also packed the Supreme Court with...

On the afternoon of August 30, 1974, President Gerald Ford gathered four of his top advisers in the Oval Office. “I’m very much inclined,” he told them,

A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author...

A sardonic joke has been spreading on Ukrainian social media since Russia began its full-scale invasion of the country on February 24. There are several

At present, proponents of school choice have the upper hand because they are backed by some of the nation’s richest people, whose campaign donations give them an outsize voice in shaping public...

The US has engaged in many armed conflicts, but three of them have never ended: the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and the so-called war on terror. Their toxic residues flow from different directions...

What a splendid era this was going to be, with one remaining superpower spreading capitalism and liberal democracy around the world. Instead, democracy and capitalism seem increasingly incompatible....

It is not until later that you have to be young it is one of the things you meant to do later but by then there is someone else living there…

In the spring of 2017, and all through the year, social media feeds in Venezuela were filled with images of deprivation and despair: long lines of people hoping to purchase food; women fighting over...

It is precisely because of poetry’s power in Uighur culture that these three poets, along with nearly every other prominent Uighur intellectual, disappeared more than two years ago into China’s...

Ayn Rand as mean girl.

What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the...

Albert Camus and morality.

Four journalists—most recently Gauri Lankesh—have been murdered in India. While it’s reasonable to be concerned about the impact of these killings on free speech and journalism, to see them primarily...

Most of us who grow up in the United States learn a reassuring narrative of ever-expanding tolerance. Yes, the country’s birth was tainted with the original sin of slavery, but Lincoln freed the...

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the...

The US government is detaining more than 13,000 migrant children, the highest number ever; as of last month, some 250 “tender age” children aged twelve or under had not yet been reunited with their...

a poem

Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it...

The president of the United States is supposed to serve the American people, not himself, and certainly not the interests of foreign states. President Trump chose to seek this office, and this...

The first enslaved African in Massachusetts was the property of the schoolmaster of Harvard. Yale funded its first graduate-level courses and its first scholarship with the rents from a small slave...

In 2003 Indian archaeologists working on a remote hilltop in the southern state of Telangana uncovered a remarkable early Buddhist monastic complex.

Trump correctly says that Putin respects strength. But of course Putin prefers weakness, which is what Trump offers. It is precisely Trump's pose of strength that reveals his crucial vulnerability....

One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory,...

America as a whole has embraced, under the name of conservatism and also patriotism, a radical departure from its own history. This richest country has been overtaken with a deep and general convic...

New Yorkers choose to gather under the banner which says “New York”—which is so elastic it really means nothing at all—and that is exactly what I love about this place. The capacity to gather without...

Two poles of Todd Haynes’s documentary film on the Velvet Underground, a band—Lou Reed, principal singer and guitar; John Cale, viola and other

The Orientalism of today, both in its sensibility and in its manner of production, is not quite the same as the Orientalism Edward Said discussed forty years ago. The hard edge of today’s Oriental...