Jason DeParle Sisyphus on the Street Tracy Kidder’s portrait of a doctor and his homeless patients offers personhood to people many Americans have trained themselves not to see. April 4, 2024 issue
Joshua Hammer Iraq’s Twenty Years of Carnage Two journalists give eyewitness accounts of the immeasurable damage inflicted on Iraq since the US invasion. March 21, 2024 issue
Kristen Martin The Parent Trap The sociologist Kelley Fong argues that we would do better by children and families if we were to widen our understanding of the social causes of adversity rather than relying solely on the blunt force of Child Protective Services. March 7, 2024 issue
Emily Raboteau A New Environmental Canon New books by Camille Dungy and Elizabeth Rush argue that the ethics of care we often associate with maternity is crucial in combating issues as large as the climate crisis. February 22, 2024 issue
Matthew Desmond Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic Why have Americans not fought to sustain the unprecedented Covid-era expansion of aid to children, renters, and gig workers? January 18, 2024 issue
David Shulman A Bitter Season in the West Bank The war in Gaza has provided Israeli settlers fresh opportunity and impunity. I see entire villages fleeing in panic. December 21, 2023 issue
Marina Warner No Freedom to Move The current politics of immigration have twisted human nature against itself, fostering unimaginable maltreatment of those who wish only to survive and live a better life. November 23, 2023 issue
Joshua Leifer Inhumane Times Israel’s current war seems to be as much a brutal insistence on the collective punishment of the Palestinian people as an offensive against Hamas. November 23, 2023 issue
Jonathan Mirsky The Truth About Tiananmen “The man who tells the truth about what really happened in Beijing will rule China.” February 8, 2001 issue
Fang Lizhi, translated by Perry Link The Chinese Amnesia Under the Chinese Communist policy of “Forgetting History,” about once each decade the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society. September 27, 1990 issue
Francine Prose Casting a Lifeline In Ma Jian’s lyrical, unexpectedly humorous novel ‘Beijing Coma,’ the narrator gradually realizes he is in a coma, having been shot in the head during the 1989 demonstration-massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. June 26, 2008 issue
Roderick MacFarquhar The End of the Chinese Revolution What Deng Xiaoping failed to comprehend is that Tiananmen Square 1989 was virtually the mirror opposite of the Cultural Revolution. July 20, 1989 issue
Liao Yiwu The Tanks and the People Twenty-five years ago, before the Tiananmen massacre, my father told me: “Son, be good and stay at home, never provoke the Communist Party.” My father knew what he was talking about. June 3, 2014
Orville Schell China’s Spring In Tiananmen Square, China had spawned one of the largest and best organized nonviolent political protest movements the world had ever seen. June 29, 1989 issue
Pu Zhiqiang ‘June Fourth’ Seventeen Years Later: How I Kept a Promise Every year on the evening of June 3, I have come back to Tiananmen to linger for a while. My wife, our son, and I join a few good friends to gather at the base of the Martyrs’ Monument and spend some time in reflection. August 10, 2006 issue
Perry Link The Chinese Intellectuals and the Revolt For foreigners who live in Beijing, it was already clear, listening to intellectuals, students, and ordinary citizens, that yet another modern Chinese crisis was looming. But no one anticipated the force and volume of what happened. June 29, 1989 issue
Joshua Leifer A ‘Moral, Strategic, and Diplomatic Abyss’ In the latest round of disputes within Israel’s ruling coalition, the eliminationist, messianic far right seems poised to triumph. July 2, 2024
Kenneth Roth Crimes of War in Gaza Civilians in Gaza are in grave danger from Israel’s disregard for international law. July 18, 2024 issue
Joshua Craze Sudan Starves As its civil war rages on, Sudan is facing the largest famine the world has seen for at least forty years. June 23, 2024
Duncan Hosie The Hollowing of the Eighth Amendment The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has been quietly rolling back a longstanding consensus over cruel and unusual punishment. June 18, 2024
Isabella Hammad Acts of Language Amid the actual violence of Israel’s assault on Gaza, why have so many writers treated pro-Palestine speech as a threat? June 13, 2024
Neve Gordon Israel’s Universities: The Crackdown Last October, Palestinian students and academic staff in Israel faced unprecedented penalties for their speech. Now the repression persists. June 5, 2024
Zhenya Bruno Russian Decency In the investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko’s new book about Russia, resistance is carried out through small, discreet acts. June 20, 2024 issue
Linda Greenhouse The Constant Presence of Fear The anthropologist Laurence Ralph has long written about the search for meaning in lives beset by conflict and crisis. In Sito, his new book about the murder of a nineteen-year-old relative, one of the seekers turns out to be Ralph himself. June 20, 2024 issue
Gyan Prakash A ‘Life of Contradictions’ As Indian democracy comes under increasing threat from Hindu nationalists, the Dalit politician B.R. Ambedkar’s fight against caste inequality acquires a new significance. June 20, 2024 issue
Ed Vulliamy D-Day’s Forgotten Victims Speak Out Eighty years after D-Day, few know one of its darkest stories: the thousands of French civilians killed by a British and American carpet-bombing campaign of little military purpose. June 20, 2024 issue