These Disunited States
The Ukraine war and global economic troubles momentarily overshadowed domestic discord in the United States earlier this year, but it didn’t go away. The groundless insistence...
Brick, Mortar, and Rot
Stability is to the Spanish what freedom is to Americans. (This is a stereotype, but life abroad inures you to stereotypes you may have rejected as...
Family Lore
For fifty years the historian and novelist Marina Warner has been teaching us how to see the histories that lie behind myths and symbols, and especially...
Immune to Despair
When I visited Ukraine in July 2016, only one way remained across the Siverskyi Donets River to the separatist Luhansk People’s Republic: a bridge half destroyed...
How to Cast a Metal Lizard
In 1627–1628 Charles I of England bought an enormous art collection from Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua. The Gonzaga dynasty had hosted Andrea Mantegna and Giulio Romano...
Promise and Disillusion in South Africa
On a scorching summer morning ten years ago, I attended a rally in a mining settlement north of Johannesburg headlined by Julius Malema, the pudgy, firebrand...
Questioning Desire
Second-wave feminism was a movement with many fronts: antidiscrimination and legal equality; subsidized child care; health care and reproductive rights; the prevention and prosecution of domestic...
Xanadu’s Architect
1. Half a century ago, second-wave feminism swelled into a social tsunami that wrought profound changes in American life. Among them was a concerted effort to...
Outdoing Reality
The Lockheed Martin Hellfire 114 R9X, nicknamed the “ninja bomb” or the “flying Ginsu,” is an air-to-surface, drone-launched missile, approximately five feet long and seven inches...
Where Does the Buck Stop?
Midway through Hernan Diaz’s wondrous new novel, Trust, a wealthy financier sits at a desk, looking out of a high-rise window at a welder, suspended on...
