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Kenya’s Human Rights Emergency

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

At the moment, gut reactions may well support reductions in our nation’s reliance on police to solve our many problems. But if crime rises, politicians will once again compete to show that they are tougher than their opponents. If we want reform to last, we must do more than “defund the police.” We need to rethink the institutional structures that will determine criminal justice policy for years to come.

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

Namwali Serpell

His jazz oscillates wildly, swerving from muddle to melody, riding dissonance into harmonics, skittering between sparkling notes and abrupt silence—the syncope that makes a rhythm a rhythm. Sun Ra’s art in all forms offers this challenge to black people: If we’re nothing, if we’re just myths, why not make that literal, why not make it material? Why not create, why not become, glittering black matter?

Eric Hobsbawm: Clear, Inclusive, Lasting

Mark Mazower

The historian’s works themselves are his memorial. What is there to learn from his biography?

Wanting Wrong

Anne Enright

On Miranda Popkey’s ‘Topics of Conversation’ and Ariana Harwicz’s ‘Die, My Love’

Unpresidented

Fintan O’Toole

Toxic residues from the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and the so-called war on terror continue to flow into American politics

France: After Lockdown, the Street

Rachel Donadio

Over the course of a long, strange April—during which France recorded nearly 20,000 Covid-19 deaths—something had shifted.

Fiction and Responsibility

Esther Allen

Andrew Altschul’s ‘The Gringa’

How to Fix Child Poverty

Jason DeParle

The National Academies estimate that child poverty costs the country $800 billion to $1.1 trillion a year—including lower adult earnings, worse health, and higher crime.

Ransacking the Republic

Walter M. Shaub Jr.

Trump and his Republican wrecking crew are ripping out the floorboards under the government ethics program.

Democracy’s Red Line

Hari Kunzru

On Masha Gessen’s ‘Surviving Autocracy’

Just Use Your Thinking Pump!

Jessica Riskin

What is the scientific method, and when, where, and how did it become, as the kids say, a thing?

What Is College Worth?

Jonathan Zimmerman

As tuition and student debt continue to skyrocket, it’s worth asking how much longer we can sustain this system.

A Legacy of Torture in Chicago

Peter C. Baker

Laurence Ralph’s ‘The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence’

An Ethical Path to a Covid Vaccine

Carl Elliott

Many idealistic young people seem willing to risk their health for the common good. The question is how to make Phase I studies safe and fair.

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The Sickness in Our Food Supply

Michael Pollan

The pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well.

What Kind of Country Do We Want?

Marilynne Robinson

Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America?

The Pillage of India

Christopher de Bellaigue

William Dalrymple’s ‘The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire’ and Shashi Tharoor’s ‘Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India’

The Housing Vultures

Francesca Mari

The investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis are dictating the bailout of this one.

Sex and Sincerity

Sigrid Nunez

What happens when someone sets out to write fiction that is “100 percent pornographic and 100 percent high art”?

Horace’s How-To

Gregory Hays

“Human” is the opening word of the ‘Ars Poetica.’ This is unlikely to be an accident.

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When Will We Care About Domestic Violence?

Caroline Fraser

For centuries, men have been saying, “I’ll tear her all to pieces,” and doing it, too

The Defender of Differences

Kwame Anthony Appiah

On Franz Boas and his critics

Why We Need Postal Democracy

David Cole

In the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans may have discovered the ultimate voter suppression tactic.

Brand New Dems?

Joseph O’Neill

Democrats are terrible at “messaging.” It’s time to fix that.

Getting Away With It

Andrew Martin

Nell Zink’s books are defined by a fervent restlessness, a desire to ignore the strictures that usually confine the contemporary novel.

Botch on the Rhine

Max Hastings

A meticulous and justly angry account of one of the great cock-ups of World War II

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Vector in Chief

Fintan O’Toole

To understand Trump’s incoherence, we have to take into account two contradictory impulses within the right-wing mindset: paranoia and risk.

The Master of Unknowing

Susan Tallman

Gerhard Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation.

Realists of the Soviet Fantasy

Sophie Pinkham

Artists like Deineka and Samokhvalov managed to produce valuable work while navigating the shoals of Soviet doctrine.

Other Voices, Other Rooms

Leslie Jamison

People told me motherhood would feel like deprivation—losing time, losing sleep, losing freedom—but in the beginning it felt more like sudden and exhausting plenitude.

Emergency Responder

Michael Greenberg

Prior to the pandemic, few could have predicted the astonishing performance of New York’s unloved governor, Andrew Cuomo

Opera at the Edge

Matthew Aucoin

Perhaps, in our newfound state of isolation, we can learn new ways to listen across borders, with open ears

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