An Inflection Point in Sri Lanka

In the aftermath of a protracted economic crisis and a historic popular struggle, a left-wing party has come to power. Can it address the country’s deep-rooted structural issues? 

October 28, 2024

‘We Got Kidnapped Again’

Migrants are facing unprecedented dangers traveling to—and waiting at—the US–Mexico border, but the Democratic Party has yet to rethink its immigration policy.

October 25, 2024

A Living Requiem

In her new installation, the sculptor Nour Mobarak transforms the hymns of the powerful into the complaints of the weak.

October 25, 2024

A ‘Primal Paper Forest’

In the first decade of his career, the artist CF seemed to be reinventing comics from first principles, assembling strange new worlds only to smash them into pieces.

October 24, 2024

Last Rites

Executions prevent any possibility that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church maintains that they are “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” So why do powerful American Catholics still support the practice?

October 20, 2024

The Path to Regional War

For more than nine months, Israel and the Iran-led axis of resistance maintained a precarious balance of mutual deterrence. Now that balance has collapsed.

October 11, 2024

Fragile Unity in South Africa

Short of a majority for the first time in three decades, the African National Congress now has to govern with its longtime rival. Will the alliance hold?

October 23, 2024

Pennsylvania’s Grassroots Revival

Since 2017, middle-aged women have been rebuilding the state’s Democratic party infrastructure, not just in its liberal suburbs but in its rural Republican strongholds. 

October 18, 2024

The Peril of Civil Breakdown

The US political situation radiates instability. How likely is extremist violence in the aftermath of the election?

November 7, 2024 issue

Getting Out the Fear Vote

As Trump improvises at his rallies, his grim imaginings of a mongrelized, crime-ridden country are transformed into unfalsifiable myths.

November 7, 2024 issue

The Problems with Polls

Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.

October 17, 2024 issue

Bring Back the Fight!

In recent weeks, Harris and Walz have replaced a dynamic movement with a meat-and-potatoes campaign. That needs to change.

October 3, 2024

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

May 13, 2021 issue

The Witch Hunters’ Crusade

Why did sixteenth-century investigators of witchcraft place such an inordinate emphasis on demonic sex, and why did they concentrate their inquiries on women?

September 26, 2002 issue

The Hide That Binds

A medical librarian’s history of books covered in human skin.

November 5, 2020 issue

Arthur Kern's Creatures

Arthur Kern’s unsettling, grotesque sculptures bring to mind twins fighting for space within the womb, disembodied heads frozen in cryogenic pods, an astronaut doomed to float forever through outer space.

June 1, 2016

Frankenstein’s Mother

As Muriel Spark points out in her biography of Mary Shelley, Shelley’s lucid, rational, and straightforward prose makes the surreal horrors of her story much more effective than the inflated rhetoric of her contemporaries’ Gothic tales. 

November 19, 1987 issue

On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares figure prominently in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

February 5, 2015 issue

The Edge of Horror

William Sloane might have become a master of the horror genre, or created an entirely new one. Yet we must be grateful for what we have, which is a splendid rediscovery.

September 18, 2015

One of America’s Best

Ambrose Bierce had no use for the refined eeriness of the English-style ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton, instead setting his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation in uncut forests and abandoned mining towns.

May 10, 2012 issue

Leaving the Fold

The memoir of a former nun who left her convent after twelve years reveals the contradictions of the monastic life as well as the limits of memoir.

June 20, 2024 issue

Love in Plague Time

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a novel that follows several hundred years in the life of an English nunnery in the Middle Ages, prioresses come and go, novices prove better or worse bets, and the masons leave the new chapel spire unfinished. But the interior voice speaks across the centuries.

January 16, 2020 issue

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

October 22, 2020 issue

Harrisburg: The Politics of Salvation

By 1970 Sister Elizabeth McAlister, a devout nun in the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary and an art history teacher at Marymount College, had been transformed by the recent revolution in the Church and the political turbulence of the 1960s. Then in 1970, she was arrested for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.

June 1, 1972 issue

Somali and American, a Minnesotan Community

Established by European settlers in the nineteenth century, it was once referred to as “White Cloud.” But today, this town of 68,000 inhabitants has seen a growing number of Somali refugees arrive in the last two decades to work in meat factories or to attend the local campus of the state university.

July 2, 2019

The Power Brokers

A recent history centers the Lakota and the vast territory they controlled in the story of the formation of the United States.

December 3, 2020 issue

The People’s Choice

When Jesse Ventura revealed that he does not wear underwear, Fruit of the Loom sent him 12,000 pairs of undershorts. He donated them to two charities. Even boorishness, in the alchemy of this moment, became a benefaction. The citizens of Minnesota treat Ventura as a sly practical joke they are playing on themselves.

August 12, 1999 issue

The Frog Prince

One of Garrison Keillor’s greatest gifts is his ability to modulate from realism to fantasy, or from low farce to high comedy.

November 24, 1988 issue

The Heights of Charm

“Though all FDR’s medical advice indicated the job might kill him, he had grown into it. It was what he did and who he was. His love for it was so obvious that millions would have cried out in disbelief if told that he was quitting.”

September 29, 2016 issue

The Ages of Jackson

“If the frontier was the force driving the Jacksonian upheaval, how to account for the preoccupation in the pamphlet literature by Jackson’s supporters with problems of a commercial society—with monopoly, with banking, with the business cycle, with the unequal distribution of the fruits of labor, with workingmen, with trade unions, with class conflict?”

December 7, 1989 issue

The Party Isn’t Over

“Carter is criticized for his Georgia mafia, his personal righteousness, his remaining an ‘outsider’ even while in office. But all of these are necessary if he is to retain some claim upon the South. Denied the easy appeal of Wallace and Nixon to repression and veiled racism, he must cling to the distinctive style that links him to the South.”

June 15, 1978 issue

Buchanan Redux

“James Buchanan’s great accomplishment as president was to relieve Lincoln of the burden of provoking the Civil War.”

August 8, 1974 issue

Flaubert’s Planet

Do novelists, and their readers, bear some responsibility for the climate crisis?

July 21, 2022 issue

A Hotter Russia

The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that Russia will be a relative winner in climate change, but a new book argues that the country will find itself in trouble.

June 23, 2022 issue

Reasons for Concern

The IPCC’s latest report, with warnings for supply chains and food security, may be the most suspense-filled document in human history.

March 9, 2022

Lebanon: Memories of War

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon are striking not just individual Hezbollah members but my family’s entire social world.

September 23, 2024

Killing Their Way to Peace

Israel’s targeted assassinations have never succeeded at dismantling Palestinian resistance movements. Now they threaten to set off a regional war.

August 15, 2024

A ‘Moral, Strategic, and Diplomatic Abyss’

In the latest round of disputes within Israel’s ruling coalition, the eliminationist, messianic far right seems poised to triumph. 

July 2, 2024

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

True as True Can Be

“The answer to habitat and species destruction, to climate change and pollution, is always the same: stop doing the things that cause them.”

October 26, 2024

Illuminating the Scriptorium

“There is possibly too much emphasis on the ‘wackiness’ of medieval life and thought. How easily we chortle at the goings-on in the margins of Gothic manuscripts, as if the pages were meant only to be silly.”

October 12, 2024

Vegetative States

“Just about everything we have learned about the natural world in recent decades suggests that qualities like intelligence and sentience are much more widely distributed across the animal kingdom.”

September 28, 2024

Accounts of the Struggle

“The work for Palestinians today is to explore how we can reclaim our revolutionary legacy and extend it into the twenty-first century.”

September 21, 2024

Why Do You Do It This Way?

Episode Eleven of “The Critic and Her Publics”

July 9, 2024

The Tuning Fork in the Ear

Episode Ten of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 25, 2024

The Problem of Other Minds

Episode Nine of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 11, 2024

Documents of Mundanity

Episode Eight of “The Critic and Her Publics”

May 28, 2024