I n the eighth grade I hit a kid named Kevin Flowers so hard in the face that he had to travel out of state to get a corrective rhinoplasty. He made a horrible joke. He hadn’t even been talking to me.

Of all the various isms proposed to capture Trump’s ideology, social Darwinism has perhaps the most explanatory power. Moreover, it is likely the only one that he—or the writing produced under his ...

W hen Frankenthaler was visiting Spain in 1953, her friend Sonya Rudikoff wrote to her and asked for her impressions of political life under Franco. She did not answer the question. “She had more ...

When does imagination become appropriation?The time-honored answer to this what-gives-you-the-right question is: creative imagination, which for the writer is a muscular species of empathy. Okay, I’m ...

Beyond the Ukrainian president’s finest hourI n December 2022, Time magazine named the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky its Person of the Year. The reasons seemed obvious: When Russia invaded in ...

Discussed in this essay: Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages.

What happens when we talk to animals?W hen the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a ...

The Twisted City, an illustration by Timothy Kelly. The artwork depicts a character of Kelly’s invention, “The Weaver,” in the Northern Limit, an unfinished level discarded early in the development of ...

Listen to an audio version of this article. D oes anyone believe in college education anymore? Republicans certainly don’t—a mere 19 percent of them expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of ...

T he real numbers, to most economically minded Americans, would be a face full of cold water. Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today’s U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between ...

F lash forward to the present day, as the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, “content.” As recently as fifteen years ago ...

“F ar 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 ...