Archive

Man’s Biggest Friend

The origins of the elephant–human relationship date back into prehistory.

November 21, 2019 issue

Octopus: The Footed Void

The closer you look at an octopus, the more you see.

April 30, 2013

Intrepid Navigators

Migration’s demands on birds are as daunting mentally as they are physically.

February 25, 2021 issue

Requiem for a Heavyweight

In Fathoms, Rebecca Giggs tries to comprehend the fact that whales now literally embody their increasingly polluted world.

August 19, 2021 issue

CATS

To enjoy the company of a cat, we must be prepared to forgo our dominant pack leader role, and adopt a more modest position.

November 3, 1994 issue

Horse Sense

A book for naturalists or cowboys, bluegrass aristocrats or race-track touts, distinguished academics or little girls gone horse-crazy, and all readers with an interest in Equus caballus.

May 15, 1997 issue

Moon Over Miami

Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight isn’t trying to be realistic about anything, even as it confounds what we expect from stories about young black men, starting with the film’s texture, its intricate soundtrack, tantric pace, and beauty frame by frame.

April 20, 2017 issue

Birdman’s Comic Horror

Birdman charges forward, headlong and without stopping, alternately scourging and exalting its audience with the genuine pain and the holy-fool ridiculousness of a “washed-up” former superhero.

January 28, 2015

Born Too Late

The Last Emperor is a spectacular film photographed in brilliant color. It is also a moral drama with controversial political overtones of great ambiguity.

February 18, 1988 issue

A Dissent on ‘Schindler’s List’

Oskar Schindler was an exotic exception, and Stephen Spielberg lets viewers take comfort in his virtuous behavior, but the Holocaust raises terrible questions about humanity, and it is these questions that the director did not ask.

April 21, 1994 issue

B-flat Movie

To give Amadeus every benefit of the doubt, we might assume that the presentation of Mozart as a fool is an intended irony, and congratulate the director for having chosen the best way to fail with an insoluble problem.

April 11, 1985 issue

Letter from ‘Manhattan’

The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall and Interiors are, with one exception, presented as adults, but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life.

August 16, 1979 issue

Philip Marlowe’s Revolution

“Being himself a kind of drifter, Raymond Chandler knew whereof he wrote. The mean streets down which his protagonist Philip Marlowe ventures stalwartly and alone mark the liminal frontiers between wealth and indigence, between law and some kind of order, between the city and the jungle.”

October 27, 2016 issue

Manchette: Into the Muck

Jean-Patrick Manchette wanted to demonstrate that the crime novel could be “the great moral literature of our time.”

June 18, 2014

Mystery Man

In a “clues” novel, everything depends on who is where; in a Dashiell Hammett one, it was more likely to be who was who: disguises and false names were used, dark mean streets were prowled, cars were driven at speed, people blew in from elsewhere and hid out and skipped town.

February 14, 2002 issue

The Christie Mystery

“Behind the middle-class English lady, remote and shy, whose perfectly appropriate occupation seemed to be the pouring of tea from a silver jug into thin china cups on a green lawn, was somebody else, somebody perhaps not so nice but more interesting. This other Agatha Christie knew a lot about poisons.”

December 21, 1978 issue

‘A Wakeup Call from Hell’

By striking for safe staffing levels, New York City nurses joined a wave of labor unrest that has swept the health care industry in response to Covid-19.

March 1, 2023

Tenant, Debtor, Worker, Student

In their historic strike, academic workers at the University of California took on one of the biggest employers, landlords, and financial actors in the state.

February 8, 2023

Working in Their Sleep

Meatpacking workers in Arkansas, grieving loved ones lost to Covid and struggling to pay medical bills, are organizing for justice from their employer.

December 23, 2022

Ecuador’s Historic Strike

With this summer’s strike, the country’s powerful Indigenous movement united two agendas long in tension: resistance to austerity and opposition to natural resource extraction. 

October 5, 2022

First Among Equals

“Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. In the foreground, white and red paint—conjuring threads escaping from the woman’s sewing cushion—appears as if dribbled on the canvas.”

February 7, 2019 issue

The Mysterious Women of Vermeer

Vermeer has a mind-boggling technique for transferring visual sensations from eye to canvas as if without the hand’s intervention. Color has somehow wafted down, as leaves might on water, and cohered automatically into threads and ringlets and cushions.

December 22, 2011 issue

Camera Work

“To read about Johannes Vermeer and to look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There’s an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself.”

May 31, 2001 issue

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

What Apartheid Means for Israel

A growing consensus has formed around the term—not as a rhetorical comparison to South Africa, but describing a system of domination built on the partition of Palestine.

November 5, 2021

The Gaza I Grew Up In

Working as a photojournalist there is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. You must always watch where you step.

November 6, 2020

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

March 19, 2021

Gaza vs. Liberal Zionism

Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war.

July 26, 2014

How the Awful Stuff Won

Andrew Marantz’s and Megan Phelps-Roper’s books explore the dark and far-reaching consequences of our dependence on the Internet.

November 5, 2020 issue

For the Lulz

4chan, Gamergate, and how thwarted, angry young men have reshaped political discourse

March 26, 2020 issue

‘Social Media Reward Bad Behavior’

The former head of Reddit on how platforms like Facebook have amplified disinformation—and don’t want to stop—because attention equals profit.

October 26, 2020