Books & the Arts

Ben Rhodes and the Crisis of Liberal Foreign Policy

Obama and his speechwriter and national-security adviser set out to break from the foreign-policy establishment; instead, they found themselves absorbed by it.

David Klion

The Curdled Worldview of Matthew Weiner’s ‘The Romanoffs’

The Mad Men creator’s new TV series for Amazon is a flawed and shallow send-up of miserable former aristocrats.

Erin Schwartz

The Rise and Fall of Kanye and Drake

The genres that West and Drake once defined are now the domain of a new generation of musicians.

Bijan Stephen

From the Magazine

The Odyssey of Seymour Hersh

The legendary reporter and the ambiguities of investigative reporting.

Michael Massing

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

One Thousand Years of Labor

Andrea Komlosy’s new history traces our evolving notions of work and how what we do is ultimately also about what we owe one another.

Gabriel Winant

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

The Making of 20th-Century New York

The history of America's extreme metropolis captures a city caught between radicalism and reaction.

Kim Phillips-Fein

Barbara Ehrenreich Takes On the Wellness Industry

In her new book, Ehrenreich argues that accepting death means being able to live more fully.

Megan Erickson

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

The Magic of Helen DeWitt

In the world of Some Trick, the best words are so acute they lacerate.

Becca Rothfeld

Zora Neale Hurston and the Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade’s Last Survivor

Even after Emancipation, Kossula Oluales spent the rest of his life trying to recover what was lost.

Elias Rodriques
Ad Policy

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

Noname’s Verbal Acrobatics

Being able to hold many meanings at once—political and personal—is at the heart of her latest album.

Samantha Schuyler

The Lamentations of Mount Eerie and David Byrne

Mount Eerie’s Now Only and David Byrne’s American Utopia both try to find meaning in a world of loss and death.

Bijan Stephen

The Gospel According to serpentwithfeet

The former choirboy blurs the earthly and the heavenly on his debut album, soil.

Briana Younger

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

Timothy Snyder’s Bleak Vision

Sophie Pinkham

Young Fathers Find a New Sound

Briana Younger

More in Culture