A characteristic mid-career I.M. Pei design began with his initial selection of an elemental geometric shape—a square, triangle, or circle, say—which he then bisected (often on an acute angle),…

Karen Russell’s new collection, Orange World, contains eight stories whose weirdness rests largely in their premises. “Bog Girl: A Romance” is a love story about a teenage boy and the girlfriend he…

“Almost great” is George Packer’s measured judgment on the life and character of the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who was trying to broker an end to the war in Afghanistan when he died…

The Orientalism of today, both in its sensibility and in its manner of production, is not quite the same as the Orientalism Edward Said discussed forty years ago. The hard edge of today’s Orientalism…

How can the contemporary novel speak the unspeakable? It’s an old question, a tired one perhaps, now that “the unspeakable” has come to encompass many forms of trauma that writers regularly speak…

Oliver Sacks found it impossible to work in the abstract; only when he went to work in a hospital as a neurologist, interacting with patients, did he begin to fulfill his potential. His natural…

For the American right, Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president of the United States was a moment of political rebirth. Elements of American conservatism had long fostered a…

A government official with first-hand knowledge of the matter told me that Jeff Sessions enlisted his subordinates to lie on his behalf that he did not know he was under federal investigation when he…

Close to half a million people saw the huge Bruegel exhibition in Vienna marking the 450th anniversary of the artist’s death. Pieter Bruegel the Elder died on September 9, 1569, but the…

The first visit I made to Calcutta that I can remember was over Christmas in 1981. I was seven. It had been exactly twenty-five years since my grandfather Sudhir had taken a job at the United Nations,…

Kathy Acker was nothing if not a mistress of the contradictions of being woman, a post-punk amalgam of de Sade’s masochistic Justine, virtuous in her enforced prostitution, and his triumphant…

Almost two out of every three women in jail have not been convicted of a crime, and are awaiting resolution of their cases. In many parts of the country, women remain in jail primarily because they…

The word “inoculate” has its origin in the care of gardens and orchards, and was originally used to describe the grafting of a bud onto a tree. It’s unfortunate that vaccination has come to be seen as…

Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz: all three of these billionaire-politicians began their careers in that semicivilized field of aggression known as sales. Schultz sold Xerox copiers in…

The black former miners of Lynch, Kentucky, are troubled that no one knows their stories. The nation’s news media, and even the publishers of literary memoirs, feed the myth that the forgotten people…

Every year, on December 17, sex workers from Bombay to Zagreb gather to demand that the world stop killing their colleagues. The International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers started in 2003,…

President Trump appears to be testing the American political system’s tolerance for soft dictatorship through the cavalier—and potentially illegal—use of presidential emergency powers. On February 15,…

If Hannah Arendt’s descriptions of the dynamics of totalitarian movements hold good—and they largely do—her explanations for them do not. As a result, if Trump has triggered a crisis of progressive…

Each shade and color, each face and object call out for attention without our losing the sense that every painting is of a single place at one single moment.

With the tide of left-populism now at a low ebb in Latin America, only Bolivia and Venezuela condemned Ecuador’s ejection of Assange and his arrest. Meanwhile, President Lenín Moreno’s government last…

The Golden Age of Mexican cinema began soon after the arrival of sound in the early 1930s and ended sometime between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s. Here in the United States, the story isn’t told…

When Joshua Sperling’s biography of John Berger arrived at my door, I approached it with trepidation. I’d known Berger for more than forty years, and biographers, having amassed reams of information…

Privately, two prosecutors who were then employed in the special counsel’s office told other Justice Department officials that had it not been for the unique nature of the case—the investigation of a…

In 1974 the performance artist Marina Abramovic stood naked and immobile in a Naples gallery. Next to her was a table with seventy-two objects, including a loaded gun. Beside the objects was a…