The New Imams

Muslim religious leaders in the US need to navigate the demands of a secularizing, pluralistic, and Islamophobic country. Several new institutions are emerging to train them.

July 15, 2025

‘Where Are Our Boys?’

A website where Ukrainians can petition the president has become a living archive of wartime and an open record of popular concerns.

July 13, 2025

A Lesson for Democrats

“We—not just Democrats who are running for office, but the DNC—should learn from Mamdani’s campaign. Don’t just talk about what we stand for, act on what we stand for.”

July 9, 2025

The Dismantling of American Health Care

We must resist Trump’s war on medical access and knowledge today, even as we prepare to rebuild something better tomorrow.

July 8, 2025

Universities: Know Your Rights!

Most recently in a flimsy report on antisemitism at Harvard, the Trump administration has been weaponizing discrimination claims to remake the country’s universities. How can they fight back?

July 2, 2025

Opening the House of Labor

Will the shocking displays of state power on display in LA cause unions to close ranks, or deepen their solidarity with immigrant workers?

July 1, 2025

Death of a Tree

New York City’s mature trees have so many advantages that nothing can substitute for just leaving them where they are. What would it take to preserve them?

June 29, 2025

‘The Canal Is Ours’

Trump’s threats to take control of the Panama Canal have stirred the memories of the Zone’s former American residents—and precipitated a struggle over the country’s sovereignty. 

June 28, 2025

The Forest and the Trees

“What makes trees easier to photograph than people is that trees are endlessly patient and have not an ounce of vanity.”

August 2, 2025

In the Zone

“I am fascinated by the imperial encounter, whether at the level of states or of individual human beings whose lives were enmeshed in these powerful governing forces.”

July 12, 2025

The New York World

“Trust your instincts as a reporter. Take risks, do cool projects, have fun. Don’t be a chore to read.”

July 5, 2025

The Museumgoer

“It’s crucial for me to believe that mere words can somehow make a difference.”

June 21, 2025

Rescuing Wonderful Shivery Tales

Folktales and fairy tales are literature from the era before silent reading.

July 9, 2015 issue

The High Priestess of the Vernacular

“To present folk culture as black communities experienced it, neither intimidated nor dressed up nor mediated by an outsider, was something of a crusade for Zora Neale Hurston.”

September 26, 2002 issue

Hard Times

“Remembering his own childhood, Hans Christian Andersen could appeal to his readers’ memories of childish humiliations, of daydreams of revenge on those by whom they had been misunderstood.”

June 27, 1991 issue

Fairy Tale Liberation

“In choosing a text, the editor of a book of fairy tales can either reproduce the original version as collected in the field, or he can retell the story—with the object of making it more elegant and literary, easier for young children to understand, more moral, or less disturbing.”

December 17, 1970 issue

A Legacy of Torture in Chicago

“Chicago has a police torture problem. The exact size of this problem is not known and perhaps never will be. What is known for sure is that between 1972 and 1991 at least 125 black Chicagoans were tortured by police officers in the Area 2 precinct building on the city’s predominantly black South Side.”

July 2, 2020 issue

Fabricated Evidence in the Kent State Killings

“After the report on the Kent State killings by the Ohio special Portage County grand jury, law officers may feel as free to shoot white students as they do black.”

December 3, 1970 issue

Law & Disorder in Los Angeles

“This is a public, surveys have suggested, that believes crime to be the number-one domestic political issue, want strong law enforcement, and would not and often did not make much of a fuss about police brutality as long as it was kept out of sight, out of mind.” 

October 10, 1991 issue

The Problem of Police Powers for People Living While Black

There is no doubt that our country’s troubled racial history has helped shape current attitudes. It should not surprise us that the police more often apply that discretion to black people in degrading and dangerous ways.

June 13, 2020

O Billionaires!

“What Michael Bloomberg proposes is not a politics of the center but a politics of the status quo, that of a system that has engineered the biggest redistribution of wealth—upward—in human history.”

May 23, 2019 issue

The Desert Prince

“Watching the mayor govern has, at times, been a sickening spectacle, like a one-sided schoolyard fight. Giuliani has rarely been satisfied merely to defeat his foes; he seems to need to crush them.”

October 19, 2000 issue

I’m the Greatest!

“This is Ed Koch in person, not a motion picture, certainly not a ghostwriter’s simulation. The voice runs on and on, breezy, cocky, truculent, self-satisfied, self-centered, vainglorious.”

April 12, 1984 issue

New York’s Finest

“La Guardia remains New York’s greatest mayor. It seems implausible today that a person could be both demagogue and hero. But the contradiction was at the heart of La Guardia’s character.”

February 12, 2004 issue

In Trump’s Dragnet

Over the past two months, the president has been doing just what he promised during his campaign: assaulting every aspect of the US immigration system. 

March 30, 2025

‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’

Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is the result not just of the Trump administration’s agenda but of more than a year of moral panic around pro-Palestine protest. 

March 15, 2025

Deportation Nation

The deportation system held sway over immigrant communities long before Trump became president, but under his direction it has become even more far-reaching, arbitrary, and cruel.

October 8, 2020 issue

Inside the Deportation Courts

There is no principle of innocent until proven guilty in immigration court.

October 10, 2019 issue

From Comedy to Brutality

With his designs on Greenland and Gaza, Trump has signaled that his first term’s outlandish gestures are the second term’s savage demands.

March 13, 2025 issue

Forced Amnesia

The metamorphosis of J. D. Vance from economic realist to champion of Trump’s grievance-fueled politics reveals how little Democrats have done to connect with working-class Americans.

May 29, 2025 issue

The Second Coming

Disinhibition will be the order of the day in Donald Trump’s America.

December 5, 2024 issue

Savior Complexes

The final weeks of Joe Biden’s campaign were most dismaying for the ways he mirrored Trump.

August 15, 2024 issue

‘The Slow Bleeding Out of a Country’

Israel’s assault on Lebanon threatens to render the very conditions of life impossible and hasten the country’s disintegration.

November 2, 2024

Killing Their Way to Peace

Israel’s targeted assassinations have never succeeded at dismantling Palestinian resistance movements. Now they threaten to set off a regional war.

August 15, 2024

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

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

Video Games: The Secret Life

How games work and what they can mean

October 8, 2015 issue

Could Internet Culture Be Different?

Kevin Driscoll’s study of early Internet communities contains a vision for a less hostile and homogenous future of social networking.

June 9, 2022 issue

Generation Why?

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks.

November 25, 2010 issue

Exhausting All Possibilities

The video game The Stanley Parable is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.

August 18, 2022 issue

The Art of Elsewhere

“Gorey sent dispatches from a dream world where Edwardian grandees cross paths with temptresses in flapper dresses, children confront animals nobody has ever seen before, and eerily depopulated interiors and landscapes leave us feeling that calamity is just around the corner.”

May 10, 2018 issue

Gorey Treasures

Edward Gorey’s drawings capture “a whole little personal world,” as Edmund Wilson put it: “equally amusing and sombre, nostalgic at the same time as claustrophobic, at the same time poetic and poisoned.”

August 4, 2012

In Goreyland

“Among image-makers, who but he would have made us look with lasting enjoyment at a skeleton that lies reading in a hammock, center front, while a few feet behind him a garden party goes on as if nothing unusual was happening?”

March 28, 2002 issue

On Edward Gorey (1925–2000)

“In these macabre comedies, almost no one looks happy—with the striking exception of the cats, who always seem to be having a wonderful time.”

May 25, 2000 issue