‘Imagination for the Other Fellow’

Fans and pundits have frequently wrapped Mamdani in Fiorello La Guardia’s mythic mantle—even when the comparison seems naïve or premature.

January 4, 2026

Sanctuary City

The question is less what Zohran Mamdani symbolizes for New York’s immigrant communities than what benefits he might deliver for them. 

January 2, 2026

Wielding the Ice Pick

Zohran Mamdani has revealed himself to be a hard-nosed practitioner of realpolitik, especially within his own coalition.

January 1, 2026

Until the Next Storm

With the deadlines imposed by New York’s signature climate law looming, Zohran Mamdani will have to enforce the city’s green transition.

January 1, 2026

Democratic Excellence

Among Zohran Mamdani’s rhetorical innovations has been his declaration of war on mediocrity.

December 31, 2025

The Radiance of Tentative Hope

Zohran Mamdani’s victory has restored some of the city’s bounce—for now.

December 31, 2025

L’Affaire Carlson

Concern over antisemitism on the right has split the conservative world in two—and GOP gatekeepers have lost the ability to contain it.

December 21, 2025

‘Minimum Victory’

Weary of war and staring down the likelihood of an unjust peace, Ukrainian intellectuals are plotting out a road map for the future. 

December 20, 2025

‘They Killed Our People’

More than a century after white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas, murdered hundreds of black sharecroppers in 1919, the massacre’s memory remains contested. 

December 19, 2025

East Side Story

Josh Safdie’s new film, starring Timothée Chalamet, is both a character study of monomania and a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost.

December 18, 2025

‘The Ancient and Long-Forgotten Language of Cinematography’

If the movies are dead, why does Bi Gan’s Resurrection feel so alive?

December 13, 2025

The Liberator

At a moment when American architecture was caught between an exhausted Modernism and a callow Postmodernism, Frank Gehry showed the way forward. 

December 12, 2025

The Scramble for the Seafloor

With the Trump administration’s backing, an emerging industry could start mining minerals from the bottom of the sea—and risk turning the ocean into a free-for-all.

December 10, 2025

‘Want in the Midst of Abundance’

Food banks were meant to be America’s safety net of last resort. As further SNAP cuts loom, how much weight can they bear?

December 9, 2025

When the Spleen Ran Out

Memories of East Village restaurants, circa 1977

December 4, 2025

The Quest for the Magical Jesus

“Whether he was tattooed or crazy or a crook, Jesus can easily be fitted into a general view of what magicians were at the time thought to be: anything on the scale from mountebanks and peddlers of amulets to great sages and ‘divine men.’”

October 26, 1978 issue

Jesus, Mary, and Mary

If the Church and world persist for another two thousand years, the subject of Mary’s virginity will still be maddeningly controversial.

November 21, 2019 issue

An Outsider from the Beginning

Sifting the contradictions of the Bible can bring Jesus and Mary into sharper focus and illuminate their surprisingly human features.

December 18, 2025 issue

Jefferson’s Jesus

“The third president, converted to a cult of Jesus while he was in the White House, spent the last years of his life reading himself to sleep over the Gospels.”

November 24, 1983 issue

My Lost City

“Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.”

November 6, 2003 issue

Sundays at Slugs’

Following Ornette Coleman’s death, Charles Simic spoke to his brother Milan Simich, who has produced concerts and recordings for more than twenty-five years, about the avant-garde jazz scene in New York’s East Village that gave rise to that music.

July 29, 2015

What Happened to the West Village?

The neighborhood became the epicenter of what the remorseless rise of rents will do to a once mixed and diverse city, rich foremost in its peoples and cultures.

October 9, 2019

Paradise on 13th Street

Hidden within the storied Greenwich Village hangout Spain were remnants of the neighborhood’s bohemian past. 

August 22, 2023

The Buffalo I Knew

The city is at a crossroads. Which path will it take?

July 9, 2022

Far Away

When I moved from Kingston to New York, V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival became part of my internal rhythm of resistance in the city, my bulwark against losing the gift of fantasy. 

October 21, 2022

Maine’s Sublime Canvas

I grew up attuned to the strange contradictions of life in the rural yet cosmopolitan towns of Down East Maine, studded with galleries, where well-known writers hide out in old farmhouses.

September 12, 2020

A Park Apart

In Irina Rozovsky’s In Plain Air, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is an oasis of recreation.

April 23, 2021

My History with Needles

By strange alchemy, a treatment for allergies also cured my aversion to literature. It was those jabs that made me a writer.

June 23, 2021

‘Since I Became Symptomatic’

When I wake with my heart pounding in the middle of the night, my sheets are soaked with sweat that must be full of virus. The virus is my new partner, our third companion in the apartment, wetly draped across my body in the night.

March 26, 2020

The Feeling of Disorder

“I could say I felt well, in my usual state of health—at least such health and energy as a fairly active eighty-one-year-old can hope to enjoy—and this despite learning, a month earlier, that much of my liver was occupied by metastatic cancer.”

April 23, 2015 issue

Night

“Morning brings some respite, though it says something about the lonely journey through the night that the prospect of being transferred to a wheelchair for the rest of the day should raise one’s spirits!”

January 14, 2010 issue

Moon Over Miami

Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight isn’t trying to be realistic about anything, even as it confounds what we expect from stories about young black men, starting with the film’s texture, its intricate soundtrack, tantric pace, and beauty frame by frame.

April 20, 2017 issue

Birdman’s Comic Horror

Birdman charges forward, headlong and without stopping, alternately scourging and exalting its audience with the genuine pain and the holy-fool ridiculousness of a “washed-up” former superhero.

January 28, 2015

Born Too Late

The Last Emperor is a spectacular film photographed in brilliant color. It is also a moral drama with controversial political overtones of great ambiguity.

February 18, 1988 issue

A Dissent on ‘Schindler’s List’

Oskar Schindler was an exotic exception, and Stephen Spielberg lets viewers take comfort in his virtuous behavior, but the Holocaust raises terrible questions about humanity, and it is these questions that the director did not ask.

April 21, 1994 issue

B-flat Movie

To give Amadeus every benefit of the doubt, we might assume that the presentation of Mozart as a fool is an intended irony, and congratulate the director for having chosen the best way to fail with an insoluble problem.

April 11, 1985 issue

Letter from ‘Manhattan’

The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall and Interiors are, with one exception, presented as adults, but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life.

August 16, 1979 issue

A Christmas Story

“The Bible is a collection of texts beyond and outside us, and we may find its messages strange and even unwelcome. There’s nothing we can do about that, except to examine ourselves afresh.”

December 20, 2025

Investing in the Wrong Securities

“The less coherent and self-confident ‘the West’ is, the more it needs an outside threat.”

December 6, 2025

‘But Not Yet’

“For those people who feel that they haven’t accomplished enough yet—which is to say almost all of us!—Amy Clampitt’s life provides an allegory of persistence rewarded.”

November 29, 2025

‘Adventures in Sensations’

“I don’t know if we’ve ever lived in a moment when artists were as self-conscious about the state of their own markets.”

November 22, 2025

Gaza: The Threat of Partition

By putting the possibility of reconstruction out of reach for many Palestinians in Gaza, the current UN-endorsed “peace plan” may make it impossible for them to remain. 

November 23, 2025

What ‘Day After’ for Gaza?

The most influential plans for rebuilding Gaza start from the premise that Palestinians have no right to determine their future.

October 25, 2025

‘A Life That Is Not a Life’

My friend Awdah Hathaleen devoted himself to ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. His killing demonstrates just how little distance remains between settlers and the state.

September 5, 2025

‘Infinite License’

The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.

April 24, 2025 issue