When a Salmon Strays

Swimming up Argentina’s Paraná River, a non-native fish encountered a landscape being remade at an unprecedented speed.

October 14, 2025

The End of Asylum

The second Trump administration has collapsed the distinction between political and economic migrants. Did it make sense to separate them to begin with?

October 12, 2025

‘One Being Dancing’

In her latest performance, the eighty-five-year-old dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs takes up one of her great influences: the work of Gertrude Stein. 

October 10, 2025

Psalmist of the Gap

Often mislabeled as a proto-Zionist oracle of vengeance, Hayim Nahman Bialik speaks to us now instead as a poet of poise under soul-crushing pressure. 

October 9, 2025

Serene and Delirious

Both the strengths and weaknesses of Miguel Gomes’s films come from their commitment to capturing the porousness of life.

October 5, 2025

The War Over Defense Tech

Silicon Valley firms like Palantir and Anduril are threatening the foundations of US industrial policy even as they call for reenergizing it. What made their current bid for power possible?

October 4, 2025

Catching Us Looking

Gustave Caillebotte subverts our expectations about lines of sight and lines of desire.

September 30, 2025

The Costs of the Cloud

How much power does AI consume?

September 27, 2025

The Act of Persuasion

The drama of Elizabeth Hardwick’s life emanated from an elemental restlessness and a desire for sovereignty over her intellect and emotion.

April 21, 2022 issue

The Medium Inquisitor

“Clement Greenberg, for a slew of reasons, was the most influential art critic in American history.”

October 21, 1993 issue

Surviving in the Ruins

“I often thought of Cyril Connolly in middle age as a phenomenal baby in a pram, his hands reaching out greedily for what he saw, especially when it was far beyond him, or, if he got it, delighted for a moment and then throwing it out and crying to get it back.”

March 15, 1984 issue

The Perils of Pauline

“Ms. Kael’s quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses have not only taken over her work so thoroughly that hardly anything else, nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility, remains; they have also proved contagious, so that the content and level of critical discussion, of movies but also of other forms, have been altered astonishingly for the worse.”

August 14, 1980 issue

Anyone Can Whistle

“I’m drawn to the idea that ethics is as much about describing who we are as prescribing what we should do.”

October 4, 2025

What If We Took Democracy Seriously?

“Democracy isn’t just some woolly ideal but the very means by which material lives might be improved.”

September 27, 2025

The Typesmith

“I went to college to do illustration, because I wasn’t brave enough to paint. Coming out the other side as a graphic designer felt a little accidental.”

September 20, 2025

‘Hopefully’

“Regulating narcotics and creating a safe supply is the only way out of a toxic drug crisis that has already taken so many lives.”

September 13, 2025

How to Blow Up a Planet

For liberal supporters of the “abundance” movement, deregulation is crucial to solving climate and economic crises. Their critics argue something more confrontational is needed.

September 25, 2025 issue

Free Markets, Besieged Citizens

Why did Democratic presidents embrace an economic credo that annihilated their own public philosophy and its appeal to the electorate?

July 21, 2022 issue

What’s the Matter with Liberals?

“Once again, the ‘party of the people’ chose to sacrifice the liberal economic policies that used to connect them to such voters on the altar of centrism.”

May 12, 2005 issue

Watch Out, Democrats!

“Instead of personal prosperity, traditional working-class voters get condescending lectures about the virtues of free trade, often couched in language suggesting that anyone who doubts the benefits of globalization is a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather.”

July 20, 2000 issue

The Apprentice’s Sorcerer

Condé Nast’s editors shone brightest in its premillennial heyday, but the media company’s opaque proprietor, S. I. Newhouse Jr., made his most consequential discovery in Donald Trump.

August 10, 2025

Voice Lessons

There’s much to learn about independent media from the life and death of The Village Voice. 

April 11, 2024

The Golden Age of Glossies

Women’s magazines were once a well-paying forum for inquiry into the interior life.

January 30, 2023

Doing the New York Hustle

A pivotal word in Tina Brown’s diaries is “buzz.” Buzz is what she does.

February 22, 2018 issue

The Long Fight for Tenant Power

Organized tenants in the US have long debated how to meet the scale of the crises they face. Under Trump, that question is more pressing than ever.

July 22, 2025

A Housing Crisis in Paradise

Two residential developments in Marin County have, for different reasons, met with resistance from their communities. What can they tell us about the way out of California’s housing emergency?

April 26, 2023

No Haven

In ‘This Is All I Got,’ a report about a year in the life of a homeless single mother in New York City, Lauren Sandler finds the intractable source of homelessness in the piratical inequities of the housing market.

October 22, 2020 issue

America’s Eviction Epidemic

Across the country, millions of people are facing eviction as protections in place for the pandemic have lapsed.

September 16, 2020

Moms 4 Housing & the Right to a Home

In Oakland, a coordinated, grassroots response to the housing emergency is revealing new potential for inspiring change.

March 9, 2020

The Death and Life of a Great American Building

As affordable rents disappear, the mental health of New Yorkers increasingly becomes yet another tale of two cities. Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city?

March 7, 2018

How New York’s Tenants Won

To understand how Zohran Mamdani swept New York’s mayoral primary, it helps to know why the city’s tenants went on the offensive against real estate.

July 22, 2025

Anti-Rent Wars, Then and Now

Amid the 1840s economic crisis, landlords tried to drive out tenants in default. The remarkable movement that rose to challenge evictions can be a model for today’s housing activists.

October 25, 2021

‘A Guy Who Never Dies’

For Trump, the great problem of the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality.

August 12, 2025

A Show of Force

What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time.

July 24, 2025 issue

The Second Coming

Disinhibition will be the order of the day in Donald Trump’s America.

December 5, 2024 issue

Savior Complexes

The final weeks of Joe Biden’s campaign were most dismaying for the ways he mirrored Trump.

August 15, 2024 issue

‘Infinite License’

The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.

April 24, 2025 issue

Living the Nakba

Two recent memoirs tell the story of generations of Palestinian grief and struggle.

October 3, 2024 issue

Acts of Language

Amid the actual violence of Israel’s assault on Gaza, why have so many writers treated pro-Palestine speech as a threat?

June 13, 2024

The Road to Famine in Gaza

Hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza are at the brink of famine—a human-made disaster with roots in Israel’s history of using food as a weapon. 

March 30, 2024

Video Games: The Secret Life

How games work and what they can mean

October 8, 2015 issue

Could Internet Culture Be Different?

Kevin Driscoll’s study of early Internet communities contains a vision for a less hostile and homogenous future of social networking.

June 9, 2022 issue

Generation Why?

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks.

November 25, 2010 issue

Exhausting All Possibilities

The video game The Stanley Parable is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.

August 18, 2022 issue

Doing Their Own Research

An electoral coalition of the conspiracy cultures of both the Christian right and the countercultural left helped bring Donald Trump back to power, and now pseudoscience and paranoia are in the ascendant.

May 29, 2025 issue

The Birchers & the Trumpers

A new biography of Robert Welch traces the origins and history of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist John Birch Society and, in the process, provides historical perspective on the far-right populism of the Trump era.

June 23, 2022 issue

Reading Sade in the Age of Epstein

Reading Sade in the age of #MeToo and Jeffrey Epstein is an uncanny experience, for his novels are also a blueprint for the world of the sexual predators of today.

February 12, 2020

The New Politics of Conspiracy

Our allegiance to a fact-based reality has been constantly challenged during this presidential election. But conspiracy theories work on a different level than mere lies. They are impossible to disprove.

November 2, 2016