The Fiction of Meaningful Work

Kikuko Tsumura’s new novel examines what unites jobs good or bad: the stories we tell ourselves to cope with how much toil sucks in the first place.

Marie Solis

The Story of “El Chapo” and Why the Drug War Will Never End

A conversation with Noah Hurowitz about his new book on the Mexican drug lord and the lurid spectacle of mainstream drug coverage.

Zachary Siegel

What the Harlem Cultural Festival Represented

Questlove’s debut as a director, the documentary Summer of Soul, revisits a musical event that encapsulated the energies of Harlem in the 1960s.

David Hajdu

What Happened to Andrew Cuomo?

Ross Barkan’s The Prince tracks how the son of a progressive New York governor transformed into one focused on one thing above all else: power.

Raina Lipsitz

Barry Jenkins’s American Saga

In The Underground Railroad, Jenkins focuses how people survived slavery rather than on its brutality.

Stephen Kearse

Celebrate Good Times

Franny Choi

A Violent End

Ben Purkert

Where Would We Be Without the New Deal?

A new history charts the forgotten ways the social politics of the Roosevelt years transformed the United States.

Michael Kazin

The Rave According to Carl Craig

After the pandemic brought club life to a halt, the Detroit techno artist kept the party going in the unlikeliest of spaces.

Zack Graham

Jeremy Cooper’s Art of Ambiguities

His epistolary novel Bolt From the Blue is a sort of Künstlerroman about artistic inspiration, parenthood, and the frustrations of interpretation.

Sophie Haigney