Essays

Bad Readers

AI chatbots have been trained on trillions of words—but all in the service of plausibility over truth.

November 23, 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 Women She Left Behind

Eleanor Roosevelt’s tacit support for a program that jailed sex workers suggests the limits of the elite-led reform efforts she championed.

September 18, 2024

Desert Visions

The flamingos were listening to and watching me and I was listening to and watching them. We were reading one another.

September 4, 2024

Three Kinds of Sun

I never saw my father as comfortable and relaxed as when he was holding a gun.

August 24, 2024

A Portrait on the Wall

It had not really occurred to me until many years after her death that my grandmother could be considered representative of a whole culture.

July 14, 2024

‘This Head, These Limbs’

After encountering a mysterious painting of amputation, I found myself thinking about severed legs, personal freedom, contracts, and the law.

June 25, 2024

Forever Elsewhere

In keeping with the inalienable rights of the Storyteller, allow me to invent a different fall from grace.

June 19, 2024

Captive Minds

Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History.

September 30, 2010 issue

Ill Fares the Land

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.

April 29, 2010 issue

The New Old Nationalism

Everywhere there has been a growing absorption in what Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.” None of this began recently, born again as it were in 1989. Nationalism, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, is not “resurgent”—it never died.

May 26, 1994 issue

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

The photographer Ming Smith’s pictures of Sun Ra from 1978 beautifully capture his energy.

July 23, 2020 issue

The Banality of Empathy

Narrative is an incredible vehicle for virtual experience—we think and feel with characters. It simulates empathy, so we believe it stimulates it. But if witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?

March 2, 2019

Glossing Africa

Whenever African writers are on a panel together, we are asked about the continent as a whole. When African writers get together on our own, we talk about glossaries.

August 21, 2017