Two men were eventually arrested for the crime; for our January issue, the writer Rosa Lyster attended their trial last ...

Yet it is difficult not to feel that more mercy, rather than less, would be salutary for our society today. With polls indicating that political polarization in the United States is at an all-time ...

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“Far as the east from even, / Dim as the border star, / Life is the little creature / That carries the great cigar.” So wrote Emily Dickinson, with some unfortunate help from a computer. As I read ...

Warhol, by Blake Gopnik. Ecco. 976 pages. $45. One thing I miss is the time when America had big dreams about the future. Now it seems like nobody has big hopes for the future. We all seem to think ...

The only letter I’ve ever sent to the New York Times was in the 1980s, objecting to the paper’s suddenly pestilent use of “draconian.” During Iran–Contra the complaint must have seemed trivial; the ...

The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby. At age thirty-one, after almost two decades of chronic pain caused by endometriosis and its little-studied ravages, I had my uterus, my ...

May I be forgiven if I take as my text the sixth page of the fourth chapter of The Bonfire of the Vanities? The novel’s main character, Sherman McCoy, is driving over the Triborough Bridge in New York ...

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not unusual to enter common spaces across the United States—grocery stores, malls, office buildings—and experience a kind of perceptual whiplash. People ...

In December 2022, Time magazine named the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky its Person of the Year. The reasons seemed obvious: When Russia invaded in February of that year, few thought that ...

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is ...

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I ...