Sheer Love of the Music

Under the direction of Amelia Freedman, for sixty years the Nash Ensemble has both venerated chamber music’s history and embraced the shock of the new.

December 28, 2024

On Leverett Pond

For decades I have thought back to a moment of terror I felt one Christmas Eve nearly fifty years ago. 

December 24, 2024

Syria: The Prison Gates Thrown Open

The Assad regime’s prisons were some of the worst in the world: sites of isolation, humiliation, torture, starvation, and sadistic killing on an industrial scale.  

December 22, 2024

A Microcosm of the World

The complete, unaired 1976 BBC interview

December 21, 2024

The Darkroom of Propaganda

“It now shows in the lower depths of the Internet as well as on talk radio shows and a hundred perfidious podcasts, where the sleep of reason becomes a populist mania, and hostility a kind of sport.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Trump at the Supreme Court

“The amateurish nature of many of the first Trump administration’s encounters with the Supreme Court is highly likely to be replaced by a more disciplined and strategic approach.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Antisystemic Times

“Large numbers of Americans have come to believe that their body politic is severely diseased. In Trump, they have found a man ruthless enough to inflict the remedy.”

December 19, 2024 issue

On Abortion Rights

“I, like physicians in Texas, Idaho, and elsewhere, will be forced to turn patients away—not for medical reasons, not because I am not trained to help them, but because of moral decrees handed down by politicians.”

December 19, 2024 issue

The Rise of Authoritarianism

The triumph of Trump and Trumpism in the United States will add legitimacy to the rule of autocrats all over the world.

December 19, 2024 issue

The Task of the Journalist

“Our highest calling is not short-term persuasion or immediate influence but diligent documentation.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Nemesis

“Will workers be served by a president who openly praises union-busters? Of course not, but Trump’s promise was to be their retribution, not to solve their problems.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Words Without Consequences

“How can one not see through something so threadbare, so self-serving, so randomly and contemptuously thrown out by the self-adoring crooner?”

December 19, 2024 issue

The Styrofoam Presidency

Many hoped Trump’s aesthetics were not a reflection of his entire political self, but merely a style that could be dropped when the occasion demanded it. But when the inauguration came, Trump trampled on some of the most hallowed public rituals of American power.

January 24, 2017

What He Really Said

President Obama’s first inauguration was the first time black people had come to Washington in great numbers, but not to protest.

February 26, 2009 issue

Beyond the Fringe

At George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, the National Mall was cordoned off by chainlink fencing for the first time ever. Such stringent measures may have been inconsistent with America’s ideals, but not, apparently, with its laws.

February 22, 2001 issue

Old Times

Richard Nixon’s self-denial, self-mythologizing, and self-discipline were on full display at his 1973 inauguration.

February 22, 1973 issue

Balzac’s Novel of Female Friendship

Balzac’s The Memoirs of Two Young Wives is as much a dialectical as an epistolary novel, built on the contrasts and binaries embodied in the two women’s unfolding lives, for all their nourishing friendship.

January 9, 2018

A Hungry Little Boy

“Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar).”

January 12, 2012 issue

Balzac’s Genius & Other Paradoxes

“Balzac’s claim to the title of Greatest French Novelist of All Time can hardly be disputed…. The total cast of his Comédie humaine amounts to some 3,500 characters (including a few animals)—in all of Western literature, only Shakespeare and Dickens approached such a bewildering fecundity.”

January 12, 1995 issue

Balzac Possessed

“From then on the pattern was set: an immense and increasing load of debt arising from extravagance and speculation—Balzac only had to touch a stock for the bottom to drop out of the market—against which were mortgaged the plans and profits of novel after novel. He turned his hopes and disasters into fiction as he lived through them.”

October 4, 1973 issue

The Most Influential Invention

A history of paper shares all the facts and technical processes, the quality of the rags, the size of the paper sheets, the color and texture of different surfaces and how they were achieved, but most importantly it gives us a sense of a collective human vocation for creating a world apart on the page.

August 13, 2015 issue

Disappearing Ink

“I left the New Museum’s ‘The Last Newspaper’—a show that sets out to explore the relation between newspapers and art at the end of the print era—with my fingers black from printer’s ink, just as they used to be years ago when I read the Times every morning on the subway.”

November 1, 2010

The Human Face of Type

“Serifs are not ornamental but functional: most of them are horizontal strokes that help to guide the eye rapidly and smoothly across the page. Sans-serif types, in contrast, present a thicket of vertical strokes that slow down the eye’s horizontal movement.”

August 4, 2011

The Great Comics War

Peter Maresca’s outsized and outlandish anthology Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, 1895–1915, shows just how sensational this newspaper art form was in its early years.

December 31, 2013

Our Silent Partners

Merlin Sheldrake explores how fungi challenge our understanding of nonhuman intelligence and complicate the boundaries between one organism and another.

October 7, 2021 issue

The Oldest Forest

The promise and pitfalls of commercializing kelp.

December 17, 2020 issue

Language of the Field

What hold do wildflowers have on the land, and on our hearts and tongues?

October 26, 2022

What the Trees Say

“If you look up at those mossy, fern-encrusted branches, you may well find redstarts and robins and wood warblers searching for insects, while woodpeckers and little owls build their nests in hollows in the trunk.”

December 8, 2016 issue

Clinton Agonistes

The Clinton impeachment was a situation in which a handful of people with something to gain (a book contract, a sinecure as a network “analyst,” or the justification of a failure to get either of the Clintons on Whitewater), managed to harness this phenomenon and ride it.

October 22, 1998 issue

Reagan’s Junta

“The implications of government by secret presidential junta strike at the very roots of the American system of government. One way to think about them is to note how the Iran-contra affair has been defended or rationalized by those politically or ideologically closest to the President.”

January 29, 1987 issue

A Special Supplement: Impeachment

There are two reasons for impeaching Richard Nixon. One is that this may be the only legal proceeding to determine the President’s complicity in the Watergate scandal. The other is that only so grave a step may deter a future President from such abuses.

June 28, 1973 issue

He Was No Moses

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

December 16, 2021 issue

Garum Masala

Dramatic archaeological discoveries—including a marble Buddha in Egypt and jars of Mediterranean garum (fish sauce) and olive oil in India—have led scholars to radically reassess the size and importance of the trade between ancient Rome and India.

April 20, 2023 issue

Missionaries, Merlins, and Merchants

Recent scholarship illuminates how medieval Southeast Asia transformed Indian cultural and religious ideas brought to the region by monks and traders.

December 22, 2022 issue

Painting the Cosmic Ocean

“Mountain fortresses suddenly blossomed with artists, many of whom had been trained in the now-defunct Mughal ateliers, each family of painters competing with and inspiring one another in a manner comparable to the rival city-states of Renaissance Italy.”

June 6, 2019 issue

The Greatest Ancient Picture Gallery

One of the great wonders of India: the painted caves of Ajanta

October 23, 2014 issue

Flaubert’s Planet

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

July 21, 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

The Forest Eaters

In 2017, the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moved from São Paulo to a small city in the Amazon. Her new book vividly uncovers how the rainforest is illegally seized and destroyed.

February 22, 2024 issue

‘The Slow Bleeding Out of a Country’

Israel’s assault on Lebanon threatens to render the very conditions of life impossible and hasten the country’s disintegration.

November 2, 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

What Happened

“We must allow the past to speak on its own terms, even when asking questions that are pertinent to the present.”

January 11, 2025

Eyes on the Border

“People living in unlivable circumstances will do what they can to seek a better life, whatever is being said about them in the American media.”

December 14, 2024

‘An Internal Colony’

“What makes the Ozarks unique is that the richest family in the world lives in what is historically one of the poorest regions in the country.”

December 7, 2024

The Appall

“When we see images of the desperate people under the rubble—or starving—or worse, much worse—it’s imperative to keep in mind they live, and lived, profound interior lives in which they imagined, explored, invented, and dreamed.”

November 30, 2024