‘Kish Mir in Tuchus!’

Before his violent early death at twenty-five, the Jewish Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum assembled a body of confrontational drawings. 

February 25, 2024

Imperial Era

The National Football League’s embrace of gambling, Taylor Swift, Nickelodeon subscribers, data analysts, beer enthusiasts, international sports markets, and ever more corporate sponsors helped the Super Bowl fit right in to Las Vegas.

February 25, 2024

The Mississippi and the Mekong

The photographer An-My Lê uses the tools of the imperial eye to assemble an anti-imperial aesthetic.

February 24, 2024

In My Mother’s Archive

Researching my mother’s friendships with Truman Capote and Elizabeth Bishop, her love affair with Dylan Thomas, and her own writing career, I discovered that she had led a courageous early life. 

February 20, 2024

Gaza: Two Rights of Return

Most Palestinians in Gaza are now displaced at least twice over. They have a right to choose where to return.

January 27, 2024

The American Jewish Left in Exile

Those of us whose Jewishness isn’t tethered to Israel find ourselves increasingly at the margins of American Jewish life. Do we need our own institutions?

January 28, 2024

The Long War on Gaza

Over fifty-six years, Israel has transformed Gaza from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one.

December 19, 2023

No Endgame in Gaza

After weeks of bombardment and thousands of deaths, what are Netanyahu’s political and ethical limits?

December 7, 2023 issue

‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’

A bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans’ metadata is an important first step, but it addresses only one part of the NSA’s surveillance activities.

May 10, 2014

What the NSA Knows

“The NSA and its predecessors have been gaining secret, illegal access to the communications of Americans for nearly a century.”

August 15, 2013 issue

The Ears of America

“The National Security Agency was established by President Truman—secretly: its official charter has never been made public—in the fall of 1952, but its true origins go back to the First World War.”

February 3, 1983 issue

On NSA Spying: A Letter to Congress

We are scholars of constitutional law and former government officials. We write in our individual capacities as citizens concerned by the Bush administration’s National Security Agency domestic spying program…. The Justice Department’s defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law.

February 9, 2006 issue

Philip Marlowe’s Revolution

“Being himself a kind of drifter, Raymond Chandler knew whereof he wrote. The mean streets down which his protagonist Philip Marlowe ventures stalwartly and alone mark the liminal frontiers between wealth and indigence, between law and some kind of order, between the city and the jungle.”

October 27, 2016 issue

Manchette: Into the Muck

Jean-Patrick Manchette wanted to demonstrate that the crime novel could be “the great moral literature of our time.”

June 18, 2014

Mystery Man

In a “clues” novel, everything depends on who is where; in a Dashiell Hammett one, it was more likely to be who was who: disguises and false names were used, dark mean streets were prowled, cars were driven at speed, people blew in from elsewhere and hid out and skipped town.

February 14, 2002 issue

The Christie Mystery

“Behind the middle-class English lady, remote and shy, whose perfectly appropriate occupation seemed to be the pouring of tea from a silver jug into thin china cups on a green lawn, was somebody else, somebody perhaps not so nice but more interesting. This other Agatha Christie knew a lot about poisons.”

December 21, 1978 issue

An Overabundance of Virtue

The scholar James Hankins has argued that the revival of ancient virtues was a central concern of Renaissance humanists. But can those virtues also be revived in modern America?

September 21, 2023 issue

The Orphan Among Revolutions

Christopher Clark’s history of the 1848 revolutions highlights the destinies of individuals and the legacy of the tumults.

October 5, 2023 issue

History Bright and Dark

Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and the documentary series based on the 1619 Project reflect deep divisions in how we recount our nation’s past.

May 25, 2023 issue

Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

Two new books argue that the innovations the Lincoln administration used to finance the Civil War transformed the nation from a modest and decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

May 25, 2023 issue

The Magic of Donatello

“Since the end of classical antiquity nearly a thousand years before, no Italian sculptor had tried anything so bold in the carving of marble sculpture.”

April 23, 2015 issue

The Magician

“Raphael would portray these same disciples in a painted vortex that forms—an image of pure wind—the center of his phenomenal Transfiguration, spinning each of them off on his own headlong spiral trajectory, every twist and turn of a body in space now totally under control.”

December 16, 2004 issue

Lucian Freud’s Pitiless Eye

Violent, curious, nosy, intrusive—sometimes tender—Lucian Freud was a pitiless observer of the human body, and of human vulnerability and frailty.

August 22, 2016

Gold & Geld

“Does its subject’s lush, heavy-lipped, dark-browed, green-eyed face, beneath a black blob of hair and above a silver-encrusted collar, really mesh with the astonishing efflorescence of perspective-free patterns—eyes, spirals, squares, streaks, and splotches, ostensibly related to the wistful sitter’s dress, robe, and armchair?”

December 20, 2007 issue

The Right to Speak Freely Online

“The reality is that we want some content moderation. We just want the ‘right’ content moderation. But under the First Amendment, that’s not a decision we can entrust the government to make.”

February 24, 2024

Reading the Signs

“The lesson is that you act in community and take care of others.”

February 17, 2024

Hold Up

“The nineteenth century got me into this biz and there I might return someday.”

February 10, 2024

‘I Am the Cabbage Writer’

Episode Three of “The Critic and Her Publics”

February 27, 2024

‘Wordlessness in Labor’

Episode Two of “The Critic and Her Publics”

February 13, 2024

I Want a Critic

Episode One of “The Critic and Her Publics”

January 30, 2024