Ingrid D. Rowland Filling Our Eyes with Sunshine No one who saw Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project has ever forgotten it. September 26, 2019 issue
Elizabeth Hardwick Selma, Alabama: The Charms of Goodness “How do they see themselves, we wonder, these posse-men, Sheriff Clark’s volunteers, with their guns and sticks and helmets, nearly always squat, fairfaced, middle-aged delinquents and psychopaths?” April 22, 1965 issue
Charles Komanoff Doing Without Nuclear Power The result of the accident at Three Mile Island should be the abandonment of nuclear power and the emergence of a more rational energy policy, based on measures to improve the efficiency with which energy from fossil fuels is used.” May 17, 1979 issue
Fintan O’Toole A World More Glowing Than We Will Ever Know “God himself, it seems, wants the Irish deities to be transformed into literature.” April 6, 2017 issue
Alison Lurie Liberated Girls “In Little Women there are four heroines, all different and all imperfect. They struggle to become good, but like most human beings, they never completely succeed. The implication is that it is possible to have serious faults—vanity, anger, impatience, timidity, and selfishness—and still deserve happiness.” November 3, 2005 issue
J.P. Kenyon All the Way with Henry the K “He was arguably the most atrocious tyrant who ever sat on the English throne.” September 12, 1968 issue
Denis Donoghue Ultra Writer “This is Lowry’s world, where the line between fact and fiction is impossible to find, the air is heavy with the memory of Faustus, Dante, Lazarus, Melville, Ishmael, Mexico, and mescal, and what hurts the eye is the smoke of hell.” March 3, 1966 issue
Elke Schulze He Ridiculed the Nazis The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life. September 14, 2017
Anka Muhlstein The Genius in Exile “You lose one home after another, I say to myself. Here I am, sitting with my wanderer’s staff. My feet are sore, my heart is tired, my eyes are dry.” November 6, 2014 issue
J.M. Coetzee The Man with Many Qualities “From the moment the Reichstag burned in 1933, Robert Musil foresaw how badly Germany was about to betray itself.” March 18, 1999 issue
John Willett Art of a Nasty Time Nazi art showed how certain already prevalent German traditions and characteristics could be harnessed to the Nazi cause. What is more, they recalled corresponding features in the art of other countries—the kind of tame classicism, flashy Italianate portraiture, sub-Barbizon rusticity, and lumpy earthiness that could be found also in London, Rome, Paris, and New York. June 26, 1980 issue
Alice Driver Working in Their Sleep Meatpacking workers in Arkansas, grieving loved ones lost to Covid and struggling to pay medical bills, are organizing for justice from their employer. December 23, 2022
Willa Glickman What Apps Mean for Food Delivery Workers Food delivery is nothing new. But in the online delivery industry, startups, flush with venture capital, have both altered and entrenched this historically exploitative low-wage work. September 20, 2019
Robert Kuttner Why Work Is More and More Debased “New technologies created new ways ‘of designing and monitoring the work of other parties,’ making it easier to outsource work while retaining and even intensifying control over worker performance.” October 23, 2014 issue
Roger Draper The Golden Arm “If we pretend that this transformation will automatically create new jobs for the men and women it displaces, we will probably end up with a vastly expanded underclass, not a vastly expanded pool of computer programmers.” October 24, 1985 issue
Masha Gessen The Styrofoam Presidency Many hoped Trump’s aesthetics were not a reflection of his entire political self, but merely a style that could be dropped when the occasion demanded it. But when the inauguration came, Trump trampled on some of the most hallowed public rituals of American power. January 24, 2017
Darryl Pinckney What He Really Said President Obama’s first inauguration was the first time black people had come to Washington in great numbers, but not to protest. February 26, 2009 issue
Darryl Pinckney Beyond the Fringe At George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, the National Mall was cordoned off by chainlink fencing for the first time ever. Such stringent measures may have been inconsistent with America’s ideals, but not, apparently, with its laws. February 22, 2001 issue
Francine du Plessix Gray Old Times Richard Nixon’s self-denial, self-mythologizing, and self-discipline were on full display at his 1973 inauguration. February 22, 1973 issue
Timothy Snyder Holocaust: The Ignored Reality The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust. July 16, 2009 issue
Allen Hershkowitz Finding My Father’s Auschwitz File From the time I learned that my parents had three children murdered, I knew it was my job to try to restore what the Nazis took away. January 25, 2019
Anne Applebaum The Worst of the Madness The vast majority of Hitler’s victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp. Some ten million died in killing fields in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. November 11, 2010 issue
Neal Ascherson Unspeakable News There was not much the Allies could have done. But, after all, they did not even do that residue. October 22, 1981 issue
Joseph Leo Koerner First Among Equals “Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. In the foreground, white and red paint—conjuring threads escaping from the woman’s sewing cushion—appears as if dribbled on the canvas.” February 7, 2019 issue
Julian Bell The Mysterious Women of Vermeer Vermeer has a mind-boggling technique for transferring visual sensations from eye to canvas as if without the hand’s intervention. Color has somehow wafted down, as leaves might on water, and cohered automatically into threads and ringlets and cushions. December 22, 2011 issue
Sanford Schwartz Camera Work “To read about Johannes Vermeer and to look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There’s an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself.” May 31, 2001 issue
Wisława Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak Vermeer a poem November 11, 2010 issue
Tareq Baconi What Apartheid Means for Israel A growing consensus has formed around the term—not as a rhetorical comparison to South Africa, but describing a system of domination built on the partition of Palestine. November 5, 2021
Jehad al-Saftawi The Gaza I Grew Up In Working as a photojournalist there is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. You must always watch where you step. November 6, 2020
Nathan Thrall A Day in the Life of Abed Salama One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule. March 19, 2021
Jonathan Freedland Gaza vs. Liberal Zionism Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war. July 26, 2014
William Dalrymple Garum Masala Dramatic archaeological discoveries—including a marble Buddha in Egypt and jars of Mediterranean garum (fish sauce) and olive oil in India—have led scholars to radically reassess the size and importance of the trade between ancient Rome and India. April 20, 2023 issue
William Dalrymple Missionaries, Merlins, and Merchants Recent scholarship illuminates how medieval Southeast Asia transformed Indian cultural and religious ideas brought to the region by monks and traders. December 22, 2022 issue
William Dalrymple Painting the Cosmic Ocean “Mountain fortresses suddenly blossomed with artists, many of whom had been trained in the now-defunct Mughal ateliers, each family of painters competing with and inspiring one another in a manner comparable to the rival city-states of Renaissance Italy.” June 6, 2019 issue
William Dalrymple The Greatest Ancient Picture Gallery One of the great wonders of India: the painted caves of Ajanta October 23, 2014 issue
