A Most Adaptable Party
In February the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, held a gala reception at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to announce a momentous accomplishment: the...
Grievance Conservatives Are Here to Stay
The current struggle over the place of religion in American public life presents a paradox. At least by one measure, the country is less religious than...
In Her Own Voice
When I watch footage of Lorraine Hansberry—a striking enunciator and the fiery and brilliantly self-possessed Black woman best known for her play A Raisin in the...
The Broken Promise of Retirement
After almost thirty-eight years as a technical assistant at a Detroit public library and six years of retirement, Barbara Yokom found herself, in 2018, stocking shelves...
Selfies from Hell
In Martin Amis’s novel Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), a woman with amnesia comes across the works of Jane Austen. “The same thing happened in...
More Than Accomplices
One morning in the late spring of 1996, while reporting on the aftermath of the conflict in Bosnia, I was filming in a churchyard in Pale,...
India’s Streaming Auteurs
My brief love affair with Bollywood—India’s mainstream Hindi-language cinema—began when I was ten, in 1994, with the release of a film called Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!...
Dostoevsky and His Demons
How should one narrate the life of a great writer? Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, now supplemented by his Lectures on Dostoevsky, revivified the form...
The Landscapes Inside Us
It is a little-known fact that limpets are brilliant navigators. Renowned for their ability to hold fast, they are surprisingly mobile. When submerged by the incoming...
