This essay is featured in our Summer 2026 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. An anecdote at the end of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) neatly condenses the felt contradictions of ...

A version of this essay appears in our Summer 2025 issue under the headline “The Mamdani Model.” Become a member to get a copy. While masked, heavily armed, unidentified men are grabbing people off ...

Those who write fiction in a language other than their own are often asked what motivates their decision, even though this literary choice has a long and rich history. Joseph Conrad, for instance, did ...

In the spring of 2023, I found myself in a small meeting room in a public library on the Southside of Richmond, Virginia, taking part in a fraught conversation with profound importance to the city’s ...

George Morel is a writer from New York City.

The week after taking office in 2017, Donald Trump announced his administration’s signature policy on the administrative state—the constellation of agencies, institutions, and procedures that Congress ...

On Monday a federal judge sentenced three white men—Greg McMichael, Travis McMichael, and William Bryan—for the racially motivated murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia in 2020. The McMichaels received ...

Adam Gussow is a musician and writer. A professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, he was a member of the blues duo Satan and Adam.

Lewis Lockwood is Fanny Peabody Research Professor of Music, Emeritus at Harvard University. His many books include Beethoven: The Music and the Life, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography.

In late 2024, the world watched with a mix of hope and disbelief as opposition forces in Syria finally toppled Bashar al-Assad, ending more than fifty years of rule by the Assad family. Images of ...

In September a national network of incarcerated Americans conducted the first-ever coordinated prison strike against U.S. prison labor. The strike’s manifesto, “Call to Action Against Slavery in ...

Omer Bartov is Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. His latest book is Israel: What Went Wrong?.