Books & the Arts

Tana French’s Crime-Fiction Masterpiece

The Witch Elm is a triumph of the genre.

J. Robert Lennon

The Southern Paradox: The Democratic Party Below the Mason-Dixon Line

Why and how the region switched from being the stronghold of one party to the base of its adversary.

Michael Kazin

Earl Sweatshirt’s Relentless Introspection

On Some Rap Songs, Earl excavates hard truths about himself and his heritage, and the results are dazzling and gut-wrenching. 

Stephen Kearse

From the Magazine

How Did the Constitution Become America’s Authoritative Text?

A new history of the early American republic recasts the origins of originalism and how the Constitution gained its “fixed” status.

Karen J. Greenberg

The Worlds of Anthony Powell

Dance to the Music of Time succeeds because it escapes its origins and captures an era marked by uncertainty and wonder.

Christopher de Bellaigue

The Making of Our Polluted Age

Three new books examine how the rise of coal, oil, and gas has permanently remade our world.

Bill McKibben

History & Politics

Can Charles Mills Save Liberal Philosophy From Itself?

In his new book, the philosopher argues that political theory has obscured the history of racism in liberal societies.

Christopher Lebron

Congress’s History of Violence

A new history of the antebellum years reminds us that politics on Capitol Hill has never been civil.

Andrew Delbanco

The Bad History—and Bad Politics—of Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge’s ‘Capitalism in America’

Although the long sweep of American economic history is the ostensible subject of Capitalism in America, it tell us more about Alan Greenspan than about the history of capitalism.

Kim Phillips-Fein

Literary Criticism

The World of Eduardo Galeano

The writer's radical commitments made him an intimate witness to many of the major turning points in Latin American politics over the last 75 years.

Mark Engler

Rachel Cusk’s Struggle to Break Free

In her Outline trilogy, the English novelist finds a freedom in art that she cannot locate in life.

Maggie Doherty

The Magic of Denis Johnson

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden isn't exactly a sequel to Jesus’ Son, but it has the same breezy, epiphanic quality.

J. Robert Lennon
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Philosophy & Political Theory

What Will the State Look Like in an Era of Ecological Disaster?

Hobbes for an age of accelerated climate change.    
Alyssa Battistoni

Climate change has been a political issue in America for almost my entire life—James Hansen first testified to the reality of global warming before the Senate in 1988—but the prospects for the planet keep getting worse. At first, climate change was discussed as a distant problem, something to fix for… Continue Reading >

Music

You Need to Know About boygenius

A new indie rock supergroup sums up the best of the genre's recent women-led wave. 

Olivia Horn

Rosalía Is Flamenco’s Rule-Defying Renegade

The Catalan singer writes the next chapter in flamenco’s history on her radical new album, El Mal Querer.  

Julyssa Lopez

Earl Sweatshirt’s Relentless Introspection

On Some Rap Songs, Earl excavates hard truths about himself and his heritage, and the results are dazzling and gut-wrenching. 

Stephen Kearse

Music

SOPHIE and Blood Orange’s Thrilling Transformations

SOPHIE’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides and Blood Orange’s Negro Swan capture two high-wire acts of musical reinvention.
Bijan Stephen

Evolution is a tenuous metaphor for artistic growth, but it’s a good one for describing the kinds of progress that occur under pressure, when a certain natural selection takes place between the useful and the irrelevant. This kind of growth is thrilling to watch, not only because those developments are… Continue Reading >

Poems

Editor's Picks

Polanyi In Our Times

Nikil Saval

Ben Rhodes and the Crisis of Liberal Foreign Policy

David Klion

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