The New Baghdad

The Iraqi capital is witnessing an inequitable construction boom, as the elite launder oil money and the state reconfigures sites of dissent. 

March 22, 2025

A Nation Deranged

Matt Eich’s photobook series, “The Invisible Yoke,” is an exorcism of the country’s demons.

March 23, 2025

Frankie Newton: Lost and Found 

A trove of newly discovered newspaper articles written by the trumpeter shines fresh light on his enigmatic life. 

March 19, 2025

Single-Player Politics

Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of a health care CEO was conceived—and received—as a move within a game of symbols.

March 16, 2025

Giving In to Hitler

When confronted with an analysis of Hitler’s own words that made his goal of war perfectly clear, Neville Chamberlain retreated into complete denial: “If I accepted the author’s conclusions I should despair, but I don’t and won’t.”

September 26, 2019 issue

The Reason Why

“The passage of time, and the fond illusions fostered by the security of the cold war era and the fall of communism, have returned us to an earlier perspective in which ethics and national self-interest have parted company. We are now taught to think of foreign conflicts, in James Baker’s deathless phrase, as fights in which we have ‘no dog.’”

May 20, 1999 issue

Hitler: Hard to Resist

An offensively imaginative revisionism has come to suggest that Hitler was a political and military genius who was only marginally aware of the butchery of the Jews and the Poles. But the Germans who took part in the Claus von Stauffenberg conspiracy were not in the slightest doubt as to what his brainless military megalomania was doing to Germany or what he personally was doing to the Eastern peoples and the Jews.

September 15, 1977 issue

Munich Man

“Chamberlain was variously described as having been ‘a good mayor of Birmingham in a lean year,’ with ‘a retail mind in a wholesale business,’ who looked ‘at affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.’ Nevertheless, he became prime minister in 1937, and in the following year went to see Hitler at Munich, dressed with inadvertent appropriateness like an undertaker.”

March 28, 1985 issue

The Art of Elsewhere

“Gorey sent dispatches from a dream world where Edwardian grandees cross paths with temptresses in flapper dresses, children confront animals nobody has ever seen before, and eerily depopulated interiors and landscapes leave us feeling that calamity is just around the corner.”

May 10, 2018 issue

Gorey Treasures

Edward Gorey’s drawings capture “a whole little personal world,” as Edmund Wilson put it: “equally amusing and sombre, nostalgic at the same time as claustrophobic, at the same time poetic and poisoned.”

August 4, 2012

In Goreyland

“Among image-makers, who but he would have made us look with lasting enjoyment at a skeleton that lies reading in a hammock, center front, while a few feet behind him a garden party goes on as if nothing unusual was happening?”

March 28, 2002 issue

On Edward Gorey (1925–2000)

“In these macabre comedies, almost no one looks happy—with the striking exception of the cats, who always seem to be having a wonderful time.”

May 25, 2000 issue

The Return of Trump—I

On losers, fear, the Supreme Court, the end of the FDR era, antisystemic times, and words without consequences. 

November 8, 2024

The Return of Trump—II

On Gaza, trade, con men, sinking feelings, the federal workforce, and “Brexit plus plus plus.”

November 9, 2024

The Return of Trump—III

On abortion, labor, NatCon, the rise of authoritarianism, the darkroom of propaganda, and the threat of mass deportation. 

November 10, 2024

The Return of Trump—IV

On burnout, hell, billionaires, health care, the specter of the limousine liberal, and the anti-trans agenda.

November 11, 2024

The Return of Trump—V

On tantrums, dominion, the Southern Strategy, fearmongering ads, New York’s haves and have-nots, and Candidate Fain. 

November 13, 2024

The Return of Trump—VI

On rage, fluoride, the task of the journalist, the Garden of American Heroes, and the Buffs and the Blues. 

November 15, 2024

The Return of Trump—VII

On veterans, fascism, Africa abandoned, and “less-than-kosher activities.”

November 17, 2024

Brazil at the Crossroads

Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.

February 23, 2023 issue

Bigger than Bolsonaro

After four years in power, a movement created by elite campaigns has built a mass base.

October 28, 2022

Brazil’s Clown-Elect

“The unpredictable behavior of Brazilian voters can also lead to more baffling outcomes. In 1959, for example, Cacareco, a placid, middle-aged rhinoceros at the São Paulo zoo, was voted onto the city council, having won over 100,000 votes—and this is only the most famous case in Brazil’s long history of ‘protest votes.’”

October 14, 2010

Brazil: Lula’s Prospects

“To understand Lula it is essential to realize that he is at the core a union man, a tough labor negotiator, a formidable forger of consensus, and a leader with a charismatic ability thereafter to mobilize the crowds in the direction chosen.”

December 5, 2002 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

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

A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”

June 25, 2023

DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

March 22, 2023

The Human Costs of AI

Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware.

October 21, 2021 issue

How Smart Are Computers?

“Artificial Intelligence has gone through a sober process of realizing that human beings are cleverer than it supposed. It has turned to a more cautious and diversified strategy of accumulating ‘know-how’ rather than mounting frontal assaults.”

November 15, 1973 issue

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

“I Can’t Go On, I Must Go On”

“I’ve been trying to find some way to engage and comment on what’s been going on in Israel and Palestine, feeling that I couldn’t really sit back as a noncombatant, ducking and covering while this was happening.”

March 8, 2025

Notes from Underground

“Today the Russian government classifies different forms of protest as regular crimes. These prisoners want their actions and their persecution to be recognized as what they are: political.”

March 1, 2025