Sections

Name Stakes

Since becoming a father, I have thought a lot about what exactly we’re doing when we name something or someone after someone else. Three years ago, my wife and I,…

By Thomas Chatterton Williams,

You Must Change Your Life

In 1829, Agathon-Jean-Francois, Baron Fain, wrote a memoir of his time serving as secretary to the emperor Napoleon. A reader searching for details about great battles or power struggles will…

By Hari Kunzru,

Campaign Literature

From a certain angle, Donald Trump’s presidency may not have moved the United States in entirely the wrong direction. One of the few areas to benefit from his stewardship, the…

By Thomas Chatterton Williams,

Another World Is Possible

When I moved to New York City in 2008, my perception of safety (and everything else) was conditioned by a lifetime of American cop shows. Though I’d grown up in…

By Hari Kunzru,

Shades of Blue

Late on election night, when the betting markets were just realizing that Trump’s path to victory had narrowed, and leading voices on the left were lamenting the failure of anything…

By Thomas Chatterton Williams,

Complexity

With two supporters, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, just elected to the House of Representatives, the QAnon conspiracy theory looks set to survive in some…

By Hari Kunzru,

Solo Act

A decade ago, when my fiancée and I were living in a semilegal converted nylon factory in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and I’d just published my first book—a coming-of-age memoir into which…

By Thomas Chatterton Williams,

You Say You Want a Revolution

Morality is often reduced to choices, and imperfect choices at that. This is the human condition; to accept it and do the best we can is a brave thing, and…

By Kevin Baker,

A Game of Chance

Shirley Jackson’s devastating 1948 short story “The Lottery” takes place in what might be a provincial corner of America in which an annual, compulsory lottery lends a degree of adventure…

By Thomas Chatterton Williams,

Which Side Are You On?

On December 20, 2014, a twenty-eight-year-old man named Ismaaiyl Brinsley walked up to a parked patrol car in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, pulled out a semiautomatic handgun, and fired…

By Kevin Baker,

Triangulation

As of this writing, the United States, which has 4.2 percent of the world’s population, accounts for nearly 30 percent of total COVID-19 mortalities. Among Americans, a common response to…

By Thomas Chatterton Williams,

Things to Come

On March 30, during one of the daily briefings on the COVID-19 outbreak that had so captured the hearts and minds of New Yorkers, Governor Andrew Cuomo uttered a sentence…

By Kevin Baker,

A Malevolent Holiday

On the fifteenth of March in Paris, as the novel coronavirus outbreak—just deemed a global pandemic—ravaged Spain and Italy, I strapped my infant son into his stroller, grabbed a bottle…

By Thomas Chatterton Williams,

The Striking Gesture

“I was not elected to do small things,” President Donald Trump said upon announcing his new Middle East peace plan at the end of January. Trump was not elected to…

By Kevin Baker,

The Wanderer’s Port

I landed in Lisbon late on a temperate Thursday in January. This was the end of an unusually pan-European week for me. I’d spent the previous two days in a…

By Thomas Chatterton Williams,

Readings

Excerpts from the best and most bizarre new books, testimonies, government documents, journals, news reports, speeches, and letters.

See all

Blood Ties

From Let the Record Show, a history of ACT UP New York, which was published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It’s March 2018. I have been struggling with…

By Sarah Schulman,

Cult of Hospitality

From a lawsuit filed in February in Los Angeles County Superior Court against Panda Express and Alive Seminars, a company hired by the fast-food chain to run a four-day self-improvement…

Sweet Om Alabama

From emails sent to Alabama state representative Jeremy Gray regarding a bill to legalize the practice of yoga in K–12 schools, which was banned in 1993. I have only done…

Diary of a Country’s Priest

From Je vous pardonne tous vos péchés, a collection of French priests’ observations about the sacrament of confession. The book was published in March by Éditions de l’Opportun. The following…

By Vincent Mongaillard, Translated by Max Norman,

Without Precedent

From the livestream of a Michigan district-court hearing held in March, in which Coby Harris was charged with assaulting his girlfriend, the complaining witness. assistant prosecutor deborah davis: Who called…

Hard Pill to Swallow

From an appeal in a lawsuit against Costco, filed in the Arizona Supreme Court in March. Greg Shepherd visited his physician for a checkup and a refill of his usual…

The King in Queens

From House of Sticks, a memoir, which will be published this month by Scribner. Seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, a few years after my family left Vietnam for Ridgewood,…

By Ly Tran,

Terms of Estrangement

From the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, an online resource that began as a project of the Oxford English Dictionary. meat puppet: the human body; a physical human being, especially…

Edited by Jesse Sheidlower,

Wealth of Memory

From “Memory Store,” collected in Alien Stories, which was published last month by BOA Editions. One of the things he found most fascinating about America was that there were Memory…

By E. C. Osondu,

A Man’s World

From an assignment at Shallowater High School in Texas titled “Rules for Chivalry,” which required female students to “demonstrate to the school how the code of chivalry and standards set…

Crock Market

From descriptions of non-fungible tokens created and sold since December 2020. An NFT is a digital item with a unique tag that is stored using blockchain technology. A tweet from…

Staples Foods

From the menu of Good Fortune Burger in Toronto, which named all of its dishes after office supplies so that customers could request reimbursement from their employers. Ergonomic Aluminum Laptop…

Bones to Pick

From an email to Vince Neilstein, a co-editor at Metal Sucks magazine, sent by a reader in Florida who calls himself Prince Midnight. My uncle Filip died in the Nineties…

Code Vein Magic

From the poetry collection A Feeling of And, which is forthcoming from Black Square Editions. The room tone not quite innocent outside, abundant cloud cover one player requests the subject…

By Barry Schwabsky,

Petty Cash

From “The Assistant’s Loft,” an essay from a revised edition of the anthology Goodbye to All That, which was published last month by Seal Press. She had a name, but…

By Leslie Jamison,

Forum

Roundtable discussions of contemporary issues by the academics, writers, and thinkers who know them best.

See all

What’s in a Vote?

Electoral politics in an ailing democracy

By Danielle Allen, Jamelle Bouie, Jason Brennan, Sarah Smarsh, Astra Taylor,

Constitution in Crisis

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

By Donna Edwards, Mary Anne Franks, David Law, Lawrence Lessig, Louis Michael Seidman,

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…

By Alexander Chee, T Cooper, Garth Greenwell, Eileen Myles, Darryl Pinckney, Brontez Purnell, Michelle Tea, T Kira Madden,

Combat High

America’s addiction to war

By Andrew J. Bacevich, Buddhika Jayamaha, Danny Sjursen, Gregory Daddis, Jason Dempsey, Sarah Kreps,

[Forum]

The Minds of Others

The art of persuasion in the age of Trump

By David Bromwich, Garth Greenwell, Hanif Abdurraqib, Kelly Clancy, Laila Lalami, Mychal Denzel Smith, T. M. Luhrmann,

[Forum]

Destroyer of Worlds

Taking stock of our nuclear present

By Elaine Scarry, Eric Schlosser, Lydia Millet, Mohammed Hanif, Rachel Bronson, Theodore Postol,

[Forum]

Haleiwa, Hawaii

When people in Hawaii first learned of North Korea’s latest threat — that it might soon launch a preemptive strike that could obliterate our lovely islands with a nuclear bomb…

By Paul Theroux,

[Forum]

Berkeley Springs, West Virginia

The Kesecker family has been farming in Morgan County for seventy years. In the spring of 2016, a company called Mountaineer Gas offered them a small sum of money if…

By Lisa Elmaleh,

[Forum]

Iowa City, Iowa

Like the country as a whole, Iowa has a Republican chief executive and a Republican-controlled legislature that creates problems where they need not exist, problems that look like the effects…

By Marilynne Robinson,

[Forum]

Ojai Valley, California

Beginning in 2011, a historic drought struck California. It was officially declared over this April, largely because of rainfall in the northern half of the state. Parts of the south,…

By Chad Ress,

[Forum]

The latest issue that has come before our village board is whether to add an animal-control regulation to the village laws. A member of the public has come to one…

By Lydia Davis,

[Forum]

Ravalli County, Montana

In the summer of 2016, the Roaring Lion fire destroyed 8,500 acres across western Montana. Fighting the blaze, which required nine helicopters and 735 firefighters and other personnel, cost $11…

By Celia Talbot Tobin,

[Forum]

Tucson, Arizona

Every weekday at the federal courthouse in Tucson, Arizona, undocumented migrants are gathered in a courtroom and made to face the judge’s pulpit like shackled parishioners. Most of them are…

By Francisco Cantú,

[Forum]

Argyle, Texas

In June 2013, Governor Rick Perry signed into law the Protection of Texas Children Act, which authorized K–12 schools to designate employees who could carry weapons — and use them,…

By Spike Johnson,

Annotation

A closer look into the meanings and histories of everyday documents, diagrams, maps, and images.

See all

[Annotation]

Fiction

New fiction from today’s most exciting authors.

See all

Curving Time in Krems

Krems, whose splendor the Arab geographer al-Idrisi celebrated in 1153 as surpassing, in his view, that of Vienna, today resembles Vineta, the city submerged by the waters, among whose streets…

By Claudio Magris, Translated by Anne Milano Appel,

Overtaking

Justine was twenty-one years old that spring, Jeffers, the age at which a person begins to show her true colors, and in many ways she was revealing herself to be…

By Rachel Cusk,

Lucky Woman

The saleswoman was waiting for them as they entered the store. She had severely dyed hair and a clipboard clutched tightly to her chest. Josh thought it was possibly her…

By Elizabeth Ellen,

Detour

Too early for spring, you couldn’t trust such blinding-white sunshine in mid-March. And the smell of damp earth thawing, reviving—too soon. Abigail was feeling light-headed. Unreal. A seismic sensation, as…

By Joyce Carol Oates,

The Very Beneficial Changeling Society

I am a member of the Very Beneficial Changeling Society. Perhaps you have heard of us? We love our name, the Very Beneficial Changeling Society, because it indicates in some…

By Jesse Ball,

The Souvenir Museum

Perhaps she should have known that she would find her lost love—her Viking husband, gone these many years—in Sydesgaard, on the island of Funen, in the village of his people.…

By Elizabeth McCracken,

Drawing From Life

Called out of retirement. Already onto other things. Netflix, Roku haiku, one patient Basho letter at a time. Onto berating the orange sun god, with his changeable guard of hagiographers…

By Nicole Krauss,

New Poets

The Dogman snuck back from the bar with two Kölsches and stuck one in front of me. An old gesture. Old for us, old for history. “I quit drinking,” I…

By Michael Deagler,

The exhibit had been up for three weeks when the trouble started. As soon as Cliff arrived at the gallery that afternoon, Georgina got up from the stool where they…

By Namwali Serpell,

Nobody Gets Out Alive

Getting past the mastodon took planning. The great plated skull was wedged between the fireplace and the credenza, leaving the two ivory tusks splayed across the carpet where a coffee…

By Leigh Newman,

Annunciation

The first time she flies home for the holidays, Iris makes two friends. She is seated between a married couple, because the woman prefers the window and the man prefers…

By Clare Sestanovich,

Terrace Story

The old window gave a grand view of Yellow Tree, trunk to branch. They called it Yellow Tree even though the ginkgo was yellow for only about a week each…

By Hilary Leichter,

I Incriminate Myself So No One Else Can

The child is scared. Shrieking. She cannot get down. The child is four, in a whorl of terror. The mother is livid. Screaming. She thinks the child is weak, girly,…

By Fiona Maazel,

Padua, 1966

Miranda was tall and as dark-haired as they come. I say was and not is and that is inaccurate because she is still around and I really am not. She…

By Lisa Taddeo,

Reviews

Insight on the latest books, films, theater, and music.

See all

New Books

Clockwise from top left: “Narrative of Sojourner Truth (title page), 1850, Rubenstein Library, Duke University”; “Watch, Larkin Franklin Sr., Eatonville Historic Preservation”; “The Works of Robert Burns, First Book Purchased…

By Claire Messud,

Plane Grid, by Kim Frohsin © The artist. Courtesy Andra Norris Gallery, Burlingame, California “I am someone who can live (within reason) anywhere,” writes Aminatta Forna in her new book…

By Claire Messud,

“Asthand,” by Nina Röder, from Bath in Brilliant Green, which was published in 2018 by Kehrer Verlag © The artist. Courtesy Galerie Burster, Berlin A surprising number of novelists are…

By Claire Messud,

Naître à soi, by Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux © The artist. Courtesy Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Paris In The Year of Living Dangerously, the actress Linda Hunt puts on an unforgettable performance…

By Claire Messud,

By Claire Messud,

Lovers and Time, by Alex Kanevsky © The artist. Courtesy Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco Danielle McLaughlin’s debut novel, The Art of Falling (Random House, $28), recounts a tumultuous season…

By Claire Messud,

Puzzle

A monthly cryptic crossword from Richard Maltby Jr. (Solutions.)

See all

[Puzzle]

Findings

This month’s scientific progress—good, bad, or simply strange.

See all

Findings

Three Versions Play, The Throughs, and Turf Tiff, mixed-media artworks by Annie Lapin. Courtesy the artist; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York City Data from 162…

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Findings

The Divine Breath, The Grail, and The Light of the Soul, c. 1930, by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, from the Meditation Drawing Screenprints series © The Eranos Foundation, Ascona, Switzerland. Courtesy The…

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Por debajo de la mesa, a painting by María Fragoso Jara © The artist. Courtesy 1969 Gallery, New York City The preliminary findings of the Freigeist Junior Research Group on…

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Findings

Embroidered photographs by Julie Cockburn from the Ta Da series © The artist. Courtesy The Photographers’ Gallery, London Verbal autopsy revealed many Bangladeshis have been attacked by rabid mongooses, and…

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Findings

Thurneysser’s Demon, a mixed-media artwork (watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink on paper), by Walton Ford? © The artist. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York City Five of six early Homo species…

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Findings

I See You and Holly Coming Home, by Rebecca Ness © The artist. Courtesy Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles The unusually cold, rainy autumns of 1917 and 1918 discouraged mallards…

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Findings

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Findings

“Orange Pushy,” “Landscape,” and “Threesome,” photographs by Erin O’Keefe© The artist. Courtesy Denny Dimin Gallery, New York City Americans who are old, white, uneducated, unemployed, and live in someone else’s…

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Findings

“Ernie and Leela,” and “Ernie Under My Desk,” photographs by Tony Mendoza from his book Ernie: A Photographer’s Memoir, published by Chronicle Books. Courtesy the artist and Lee Marks Fine…

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Astronomers recorded, in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, the largest known post–Big Bang explosion, which lasted several hundred million years and created a void of fifteen galactic widths in the plasma…

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,