Recent History

Reviewing the year, in stitches.

India Tresselt

Did ‘Cancel Culture’ Drive Richard Wright Underground?

On “Memories of My Grandmother” and The Man Who Lived Underground.

Joseph G. Ramsey

Hello, Poetry, You ‘Lamenting Pleasure’

Reading poetry over the phone, David Ferry and loved ones find an antidote to loneliness.

Elizabeth Emma Ferry and Stephen Ferry

Blake Bailey’s Life as a Man

The disgraced writer’s Philip Roth biography is a document of a misogynist literary world. But I had to read the book to get the whole story.

Katha Pollitt

Vivian Gornick in Reverse

A conversation with the writer about her life and work.

Hannah Gold

Back When

Feels like a million years ago.

Peter Kuper

The Worlds of Edward Said

An exile who made the world his home, Said infused his literary style with a cosmopolitan ease and his political commitments with a cosmopolitan ethics.

Rashid Khalidi

The Tangled History of Illness and Idiocy

The pandemic is stress-testing two concepts Americans have historically gotten wrong.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Peter Handke’s Nobel Condones Violence

One of Sweden’s most important authors on how the Swedish Academy abuses its platform—and the intelligentsia lets it happen.

Johannes Anyuru

L’État, C’est Moi

Calvin Trillin