An Exception in World Affairs

Ratko Mladić’s death in The Hague is a reminder that his present-day counterparts may not have to fear that they will suffer his fate.

September 5, 2026

‘Every Tiny Molecule of Ash’

India’s historic youth uprising brought together a wide and fractured coalition. Where can it go from here?

August 30, 2026

‘You’ll Never Catch Him!’

Rising Lazarus-like from the Warner Brothers Discovery tomb, Coyote vs. Acme is an inventive, remarkably wistful movie that confronts the Looney Tunes with the grind of contemporary capitalism.

August 30, 2026

The Center of All Creation

For the artists and intellectuals who lived there across two decades of pioneering residency programs, Georgia’s Ossabaw Island was a potent source of inspiration.

August 28, 2026

The Cruel and the Frail

Reflections on weakness, violence, and solidarity from the third installment of the Georgetown Global Dialogues

August 27, 2026

‘Let Us Fall for Whatever We Want To’

The marvelous short stories of Diane Williams have the flash and feeling of dreams.

August 27, 2026

Life in the Fortress

Qian Zhongshu’s satirical masterpiece, Fortress Besieged, casts a bitter eye on pomp and folly in wartime Shanghai.

August 25, 2026

The Return of the Teen Crime Panic

A push to try more kids accused of crimes as adults reflects a backlash to decades of successful advocacy.

August 25, 2026

‘The Voodoo Thing’

The music of the elusive New Orleans pianist Dr. John seems haunted by more ghosts than its makers could have imagined.

August 23, 2026

An Ecosystem of Her Own

Maren Hassinger’s alchemical touch transforms the most resistant materials into evocations of the endlessly changing natural world.

September 24, 2026 issue

The Village Photographer

Madeleine de Sinéty sloughed off her aristocratic upbringing and spent her life capturing small-town life in Brittany and Maine.

September 24, 2026 issue

The Grand Master of Abjection

Pope.L, best known for his performance art, also made drawings and paintings animated by his sense of the absurd and his concern for the marginalized.

August 20, 2026 issue

Comics Relief

“So much of what I know now came from people taking the time to talk to me about comics and what they liked. A true gift.”

September 12, 2026

Expatriate Dreams

“Ironically, as I’ve developed a deeper relationship with Iran and more expertise about the country, it has become riskier for me to return.”

August 29, 2026

Braving the Labyrinth

“It’s very much like slipping into a time warp and making direct contact with what is no longer there. The challenge is to stay open and not make hasty judgments.”

August 22, 2026

From the Horse’s Mouth

“Punwise, I didn’t feel too reined in on BoJack. If I was champing at the bit to use a joke somewhere, I could usually find a place to trot it out!”

August 15, 2026

The Crisis of Juvenile Prison Rape: A New Report

Nationally, fewer than half of the corrections officials whose sexual abuse of juveniles is confirmed are referred for prosecution, and almost none are seriously punished. Although it is a crime for staff to have sex with inmates in all fifty states, prosecutors rarely take on such cases.

January 7, 2010

Killer Children

“When children kill other children, we come close to wishing for a Sadean solution. They come near to the top of the list of what society would prefer not to think about. We cannot kill them, but how can we bear for them to live among us?”

May 20, 1999 issue

The Crime of Reform

David Rothman’s case against our inherited system for treating criminals, juvenile delinquents, and the mentally ill.

June 26, 1980 issue

Dropping Out

“The very existence of special constraints on juveniles creates an enormous, repulsive, and repressive apparatus of petty constraint, which no rational adult would put up with for five minutes.”

March 25, 1965 issue

Alert to Reality

The first biography of James Schuyler suggests that his tendency to withdraw was both a harbinger of his disabling mood disorder and the wellspring of his shimmering poetry.

November 20, 2025 issue

John Ashbery (1927–2017)

He was lionized, imitated, studied, analyzed, enshrined, revered.

October 12, 2017 issue

Crossing the Invisible Line

The astonishing work of poet Eileen Myles set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match.

March 24, 2016 issue

The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street

“One has to go back to fairly remote periods—ancient Rome, eighteenth-century London—to find poetry as meticulous in its gossip and as minute in its urban observation as Frank O’Hara’s.”

December 2, 1993 issue

From the Archive: “A Little Iliad” by Daniel Mendelsohn

Episode 22 of Private Life

July 22, 2026

Daniel Mendelsohn on the Odyssey, Film Adaptations, and Translation

Episode 21 of Private Life

July 15, 2026

From the Archive: ‘The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street’

Episode 20 of Private Life

July 8, 2026

Iran’s New Winter

The US-Israeli war against Iran, far from encouraging a popular uprising, has strengthened the regime’s grip and set back the cause of Iranian freedom indefinitely.

May 28, 2026 issue

From the Rooftops of Tehran

We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.

April 23, 2026 issue

Longing for My Tehran

On the Israeli news, I watch as the country whose citizenship I hold devastates the one where I was born.

March 14, 2026

The Gaza Doctrine

Over the course of two years, Israeli forces systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip’s health system. Their attacks in Iran and Lebanon follow a disturbingly similar pattern.

March 22, 2026

Target Practice

Artificial intelligence systems—now an integral part of the Israeli war machine—began as tools developed to surveil every aspect of Palestinian life.

July 23, 2026

Gaza’s Deadly Soil

Amid tight Israeli restrictions, new remote research is starting to make visible the scale of toxic fallout across the Gaza Strip.

July 22, 2026

Safety Is When There’s No One Dying

Israel’s assault on Palestine and Lebanon has reconfigured how children understand the world.

June 24, 2026

Dead Lands

Rather than letting ourselves tire of repeated stories, how might we allow them to inform us about something we couldn’t grasp otherwise?

June 17, 2026

To Break the Siege

By sailing to Gaza, activists in the flotilla movement have long tried to pressure their own governments to honor international law. 

May 31, 2026

The Gaza Doctrine

Over the course of two years, Israeli forces systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip’s health system. Their attacks in Iran and Lebanon follow a disturbingly similar pattern.

March 22, 2026

Elegy for Rafah

For the tens of thousands of Gazans who need to leave the Strip but want the chance to come back home, life revolves around the Rafah crossing.

March 20, 2026

Pieces of Gaza

An exhibition in Paris of archaeological treasures from Gaza served as a reminder of how much of the Strip’s history has been destroyed.

February 12, 2026