Essays

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

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

‘Illness and Its Very Concept’

Surveying a century of political struggles over medicine and psychiatry, a recent book foregrounds a West German collective that sought to create a radical, patient-led form of health care.

May 2, 2025

Mornings with Murray

New York City always got the towering journalist Murray Kempton at full sail.

April 27, 2025

Spaghetti Underground

The MTA’s new redesign of the New York City subway map is the latest of many attempts to capture the sprawling network on paper.

April 18, 2025

Single-Player Politics

Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of a health care CEO was conceived—and received—as a move within a game of symbols.

March 16, 2025

Patriarchal Bargains

In her long-out-of-print study of conservative gender politics, Andrea Dworkin reflected on how right-wing women seek safety and status within a movement that demeans them.

February 26, 2025

‘Life, Work, and Architecture’

Elizabeth Mock, whose exhibitions on domestic architecture thrilled midcentury museumgoers, believed that contemporary design should be for everyone.

February 5, 2025

The Instrumentalist

At the heart of the film Tár is a conductor who cannot see beyond her generation’s field of vision.

January 19, 2023 issue

In Defense of Fiction

We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it.

October 24, 2019 issue

On Optimism and Despair

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities.

December 22, 2016 issue

The Cruelest Sport

A romance of (expendable) maleness—in which The Fight is honored, and even great champions come, and go.

February 13, 1992 issue

‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness’

Serial murder has emerged as the “crime of the 1990s” and our collective fascination is matched by a flood of luridly packaged paperback books on a vertiginous assortment of killers.

March 24, 1994 issue

‘Who Do You Think You Are?’

Alice Munro’s voice can seem deceptively direct, but it expresses an elliptical and poetic sort of vernacular realism in which the ceaselessly analytic voice appears to be utterly natural, as if it were the reader’s own.

December 3, 2009 issue

Left Behind in Lisbon

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Portugal is executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy.

February 10, 2022 issue