Break the Aspiration Meter!

Far from providing a nostalgic refuge from the contemporary Internet, The Sims taps into some of its most foundational assumptions. 

June 8, 2025

An Obstinate Commitment to Defeat

The conceptual artist Mike Kelley considered the creative expression of ordinary people to be beautiful, pathetic, and fascinatingly bizarre.

June 4, 2025

One Cubit at a Time

Medieval theologians produced ornate architectural drawings in their efforts to comprehend divine instructions. A recent book recovers their contributions to the form.

May 24, 2025

Beyond the Asylum

Over the past decade a range of politicians and public figures have called to rebuild asylums in order to address the country’s mental health crisis. But there is another, better way forward.

May 25, 2025

Colors and Shapes

“The best design is one that is clearly and immediately comprehensible but also notably beautiful.”

June 14, 2025

Scratching the Surface

“What we’ve come to call ‘election denial’ is, of course, a conspiracy theory, and support for that is an article of faith for many Trumpists who want to work in the administration, so to a greater or lesser extent, they’re all under the spell of conspiratorial thinking.”

June 7, 2025

Straight to It, Then

“Everyone has an opinion, but clarity is apparently in short supply.”

May 17, 2025

Translating from Troy to Ithaca

“The Odyssey is haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we’re just on our own, making our way as best we can.”

May 10, 2025

West Point and the Third Loyalty

“The ideals of socialism are anathema to them even though, paradoxically, the West Pointer is entirely cared for by the state from his birth in an army hospital (if he is born into a military family) to taps at government expense in a federal bone yard.”

October 18, 1973 issue

The Spirit of ’76

“Patience is short, prices are high, traffic is congested; patriotic pride runs rampant. The Disney in us all has created a nationwide American Revolutionland and, at least within these borders, there is no place to hide.”

May 15, 1975 issue

The Volunteer Army: Who Fights and Why?

“Over and over, I heard soldiers talk about being hard-pressed to pay the rent, of having a child and being without health care, of yearning to escape a depressing town or oppressive family, of wanting to get out and see the world.”

April 3, 2008 issue

The Lost Democratic Army

From 1948 on, nearly every able-bodied young man in the United States served and lived side by side with Americans of all colors, all in strict alphabetical order, sleeping bunk to bunk in what amounted to brotherly endurance of the cold, heat, discomfort, and misery of military training.

July 16, 2012

In Trump’s Dragnet

Over the past two months, the president has been doing just what he promised during his campaign: assaulting every aspect of the US immigration system. 

March 30, 2025

‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’

Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is the result not just of the Trump administration’s agenda but of more than a year of moral panic around pro-Palestine protest. 

March 15, 2025

Deportation Nation

The deportation system held sway over immigrant communities long before Trump became president, but under his direction it has become even more far-reaching, arbitrary, and cruel.

October 8, 2020 issue

Inside the Deportation Courts

There is no principle of innocent until proven guilty in immigration court.

October 10, 2019 issue

From Comedy to Brutality

With his designs on Greenland and Gaza, Trump has signaled that his first term’s outlandish gestures are the second term’s savage demands.

March 13, 2025 issue

Forced Amnesia

The metamorphosis of J. D. Vance from economic realist to champion of Trump’s grievance-fueled politics reveals how little Democrats have done to connect with working-class Americans.

May 29, 2025 issue

The Second Coming

Disinhibition will be the order of the day in Donald Trump’s America.

December 5, 2024 issue

Savior Complexes

The final weeks of Joe Biden’s campaign were most dismaying for the ways he mirrored Trump.

August 15, 2024 issue

‘The Slow Bleeding Out of a Country’

Israel’s assault on Lebanon threatens to render the very conditions of life impossible and hasten the country’s disintegration.

November 2, 2024

Killing Their Way to Peace

Israel’s targeted assassinations have never succeeded at dismantling Palestinian resistance movements. Now they threaten to set off a regional war.

August 15, 2024

A ‘Moral, Strategic, and Diplomatic Abyss’

In the latest round of disputes within Israel’s ruling coalition, the eliminationist, messianic far right seems poised to triumph. 

July 2, 2024

Acts of Language

Amid the actual violence of Israel’s assault on Gaza, why have so many writers treated pro-Palestine speech as a threat?

June 13, 2024

The Third Coming

“For those who cannot believe in the Second Coming, or the Messianic hopes of orthodox Judaism, there are the UFOs! If the earth is being visited by extraterrestrials, surely the aliens must be friendly or by now we would have learned otherwise.”

January 26, 1978 issue

Dinomania

When dinosaurs get the Hollywood treatment, will museums follow suit?

August 12, 1993 issue

The Wizard

“Avatar’s desire to have its anthropological cake and eat it too suggests something deeply unself-aware and disturbingly unresolved within Cameron himself.”

March 25, 2010 issue

Humorless Barbie

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie finds its comedy in the inflexibility both of plastic and of modern womanhood.

August 27, 2023

Video Games: The Secret Life

How games work and what they can mean

October 8, 2015 issue

Could Internet Culture Be Different?

Kevin Driscoll’s study of early Internet communities contains a vision for a less hostile and homogenous future of social networking.

June 9, 2022 issue

Generation Why?

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks.

November 25, 2010 issue

Exhausting All Possibilities

The video game The Stanley Parable is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.

August 18, 2022 issue

Proust’s Way?

“When it comes to a master stylist like Proust, a translator’s aim should be to capture both the luster of Proust’s insights and the stylistic pitch of his sentences.” 

December 1, 2005 issue

Proustifications

“To practice writing love letters, as Balzac said, improves a writer’s style. But Proust’s turn out also to be a store of fragments that will find their way, years ahead, in A la recherche.”

July 21, 1983 issue

Proust the Passionate Reader

“Only a few people belong to the secret order of sincere and insightful readers whom Proust respects, and among whom there exists a powerful complicity.”

April 4, 2013 issue

Proust’s Jewish Question

The debate over Proust’s relation to his Jewish identity ultimately turns not just on his personal attachments but on how he represents Jewish characters in his novel.

June 26, 2025 issue