The Fiction of Meaningful Work 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.
Aug 3, 2021 / Books & the Arts / Marie Solis
The Story of “El Chapo” and Why the Drug War Will Never End 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.
Aug 2, 2021 / Books & the Arts / Zachary Siegel
What the Harlem Cultural Festival Represented 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.
Jul 29, 2021 / Books & the Arts / David Hajdu
What Happened to Andrew Cuomo? 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.
Jul 28, 2021 / Books & the Arts / Raina Lipsitz
Barry Jenkins’s American Saga Barry Jenkins’s American Saga
In The Underground Railroad, Jenkins focuses how people survived slavery rather than on its brutality.
Jul 27, 2021 / Books & the Arts / Stephen Kearse
Celebrate Good Times Celebrate Good Times
The regime is having a birthday party, so we turn off the lights and pretend we’re sick. All night, happy americans honk their horns. We did it! they scream into our window. In the…
Jul 27, 2021 / Books & the Arts / Franny Choi
A Violent End A Violent End
the bears were swiping at the river getting nowhere Look I said to the bears the salmon are all gone because of I pointed that factory upstream What factory they said so I explaine…
Jul 27, 2021 / Books & the Arts / Ben Purkert
Where Would We Be Without the New Deal? 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.
Jul 26, 2021 / Books & the Arts / Michael Kazin
The Rave According to Carl Craig 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.
Jul 22, 2021 / Books & the Arts / Zack Graham
Jeremy Cooper’s Art of Ambiguities 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.
Jul 20, 2021 / Books & the Arts / Sophie Haigney