All the Stops

The harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has spent much of his career in the crossfire between traditionalism and new directions.

April 13, 2025

The Apathetic Court

The Supreme Court has in recent years consistently neglected petitions from inmates across the country—even those with the most persuasive claims. 

April 9, 2025

Don’t Join the Autocrats!

Trump’s overtures to Vladimir Putin are not just morally wrong but damaging to the US’s long-term interests. 

April 2, 2025

In Trump’s Dragnet

Over the past two months, the president has been doing just what he promised during his campaign: assaulting every aspect of the US immigration system. 

March 30, 2025

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

What Apps Mean for Food Delivery Workers

Food delivery is nothing new. But in the online delivery industry, startups, flush with venture capital, have both altered and entrenched this historically exploitative low-wage work.

September 20, 2019

Why Work Is More and More Debased

“New technologies created new ways ‘of designing and monitoring the work of other parties,’ making it easier to outsource work while retaining and even intensifying control over worker performance.”

October 23, 2014 issue

The Golden Arm

“If we pretend that this transformation will automatically create new jobs for the men and women it displaces, we will probably end up with a vastly expanded underclass, not a vastly expanded pool of computer programmers.”

October 24, 1985 issue

‘People Are Not a Crisis’

Eric Adams has insisted that his administration is doing its best to house New York’s asylum seekers, but the city’s shortage of shelter space is the result of political choices.

July 23, 2023

Exiles

I recognize in these young people—driven from their homes by war, famine, poverty—an unshakable energy called Hope.

July 11, 2023

The Land of Dust and Plastic

In Almería, the Moroccan and West African migrant workers who sustain the region’s booming agriculture industry find themselves either neglected or persecuted by the state. 

June 24, 2023

Journey to the North

Javier Zamora’s retelling of the almost lethal three-thousand-mile journey he made from El Salvador to the US as a child gives the experience of migration extraordinary immediacy.

June 8, 2023 issue

An Overabundance of Virtue

The scholar James Hankins has argued that the revival of ancient virtues was a central concern of Renaissance humanists. But can those virtues also be revived in modern America?

September 21, 2023 issue

The Orphan Among Revolutions

Christopher Clark’s history of the 1848 revolutions highlights the destinies of individuals and the legacy of the tumults.

October 5, 2023 issue

History Bright and Dark

Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and the documentary series based on the 1619 Project reflect deep divisions in how we recount our nation’s past.

May 25, 2023 issue

Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

Two new books argue that the innovations the Lincoln administration used to finance the Civil War transformed the nation from a modest and decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

May 25, 2023 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

The Man Who Was France

“Even the French who found themselves in England did not rush to accept de Gaulle: to the contrary, this remote and chilly figure lunching alone at the Savoy appealed to few of them, and most of the troops who had been evacuated from France that summer eventually made their way back across the Channel and regarded Pétain as the legitimate head of the French government.”

January 16, 2020 issue

The Truth About the Resistance

Who were the resisters, what were they resisting, and what difference did they really make?

February 25, 2016 issue

France Without Glory

“The political authorities born of the Resistance thought it prudent to speak and act as though the Vichy government of 1940–1944 had been a brief, unhappy interlude, a sort of illegitimate interruption of republican continuity…. This unity of purpose, however, was bought at the price of an incomplete confrontation with the memory and experience of the occupation years.”

May 23, 1996 issue

French Collaborators: The New Debate

“A striking fact about the Frenchmen indicted for crimes against humanity is that…each of them had an entirely successful career in France after the war.”

June 25, 1992 issue

What Were Dinosaurs For?

It has become impossible to think about extinction in the old ways, to regard the end-Cretaceous demise of some 80 percent of life on earth as a remote, alien fact.

December 19, 2019 issue

Dinosaur Crazy

In Terrible Lizard, Deborah Cadbury sets herself the task of explaining how the curious Victorian image of dinosaurs—“Would it not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill?” mused Charles Dickens in Bleak House—came to be.

January 17, 2002 issue

First Fine Careless Raptor

“Mammals and dinosaurs diverged from a common ancestor about 260 million years ago. Dinosaurs subsequently evolved to fill every possible ecological niche, from which they ruled the earth for 160 million years and became the most successful vertebrates in the history of the planet. During all that time we mammals managed to evolve into nothing larger than a cat.”

April 4, 1996 issue

Dinomania

When dinosaurs get the Hollywood treatment, will museums follow suit?

August 12, 1993 issue

What Is Wildness?

Wildness, a name we give to living nature, is intangible, maybe even ineffable, but it’s not imaginary—it’s biological.

May 16, 2023

Monotreme Dreams

Australia’s egg-laying monotremes and pouch-carrying marsupials may seem to be outliers, but they’re as well suited to their environment as any other mammal.

February 23, 2023 issue

Whack-a-Rat

The rats of Paris have presented their human neighbors with centuries of complex problems, and now face a controversial future.

August 17, 2023 issue

Trees in Themselves

The oldest trees prompt us to think about how embedded we are in time and could help us recalibrate our perspective on the geologic past.

March 23, 2023 issue

Continental Drift

“Over the past decade, common understanding of the EU as a peace project has weakened, and its stated purpose—to allow the free movement of people and goods—is no longer the political consensus.”

April 5, 2025

History in Open Air

“Local history bonds people today to the place where they are, giving them a stake in local people and local politics.”

March 29, 2025

A Constitutional Redline

“It is unprecedented for the federal government to proceed with a challenged action while in a court hearing on whether they can lawfully do so. It is a subversion of the rule of law.”

March 22, 2025

Brass in Pocket

“I wonder if nonfiction somehow taps into my (otherwise largely suppressed) competitive instincts. I never feel competitive when I’m writing fiction.”

March 15, 2025