Order 1, Chaos 0

Football is a crazed bid for compensation, for escape, for some transcendent atavistic loyalty.

June 29, 2024

‘This Head, These Limbs’

After encountering a mysterious painting of amputation, I found myself thinking about severed legs, personal freedom, contracts, and the law.

June 25, 2024

Sudan Starves

As its civil war rages on, Sudan is facing the largest famine the world has seen for at least forty years. 

June 23, 2024

A Long Exposure

The pioneering French photographer Hippolyte Bayard has lived in the shadows of his more famous peers. A new exhibition brings him into the light.

June 22, 2024

A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”

June 25, 2023

DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

March 22, 2023

Court v. Chatbot

In a recent experiment, chatGPT showed a more developed moral sense than the Supreme Court’s current conservative supermajority.

December 26, 2022

Whose Country?

It is impossible to talk about the blues, country, or where the two might overlap without talking about race, authenticity, and contemporary America’s relationship to its past.

November 23, 2023 issue

Bob Dylan, Historian

Across the six decades of his career, the singer-songwriter has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.

June 19, 2021

The Royal Blues

Dinah Washington’s music is fiery, uncompromising, and devoid of self-pity. She was a rarity among singers, male or female, in the popular music of her era: an unflinching, even merciless figure who was also sensual and musically sophisticated.

June 23, 2005 issue

The You and Me that Used to Be

“Looking back, I am aware that much of my life took place to music as if it were a film with a score: phonograph or radio interminably on, conversations held under the sound of music because sometimes when there was no music and we were driving or sitting around or drinking in a bar, an awkward silence hovered. Something necessary was missing. Things did not go on well without music.”

November 4, 1971 issue

On the Death Sentence

“Two years ago, quoting from an earlier opinion written by Justice White, I wrote that the death penalty represents ‘the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.’”

December 23, 2010 issue

America’s Invisible Inferno

People who have spent time in solitary confinement describe being shackled to bunks by their feet and hands, being fed slop or left without food in a state of extreme hunger, and being beaten by hooded guards armed with tasers and bats. Once you see—and smell—a solitary cell, you will never forget it.

December 8, 2016 issue

Goodbye, William!

The lie was that electrocution was both painless and swift. In too many cases, it was anything but. Those sentenced to execution often suffered hideously and for long periods. Nonetheless, such was the blind faith in technology that the public continued to disbelieve what many witnesses reported.

August 14, 2003 issue

Cruel & Unusual Punishment

Since electric shocks can be applied repeatedly, the only restraints on their sadistic repetition are the training, supervision, and ultimately the discretion of the officer involved. There is reason to suspect, however, that such discretion may decline in direct proportion to the increasing physical distance between operator and victim.

April 24, 1997 issue

The First and Last of Her Kind

The legal academy has tended to be dismissive of Sandra Day O’Connor, arguing that she had no overarching theory of constitutional interpretation. But the Supreme Court is not a law school faculty workshop. She saw herself as a problem-solver.

November 7, 2019 issue

Hail to the Chief

“John Marshall, while hugely instrumental in assuring for the federal judiciary its limited supervisory role over the legislative branch, exhibited a subservience to the executive branch that continues to haunt us.”

November 22, 2018 issue

Law Without History?

How Justice Scalia’s understanding of the Constitution is wrong

October 23, 2014 issue

Bad Man from Olympus

Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that law should be conceived as a means to the attainment of human ends, and that judges should admit that they decide debatable cases on the basis of policy, not of precedent or abstract principle.

July 13, 1995 issue

How to Understand the Dreyfus Affair

“The Dreyfus Affair demonstrates the fragility of reason, of the rights of man, and indeed of civilized values when a nation feels itself under threat from an external or internal enemy.”

June 10, 2010 issue

Holy Hysteria

“From January until October 1898 a convulsion of anti-Semitism ran through France; no major population center was spared, whether there were Jews living in it or not. There were demonstrations and riots, attacks on synagogues and shops; ‘patriots’ encouraged hotelkeepers to evict Jews from their rooms.”

April 10, 2003 issue

The Lesson of the Dreyfus Case

“Another book about the Dreyfus Affair? What could possibly justify loading another volume upon that already over-crowded shelf? The simplest answer is the timelessness of the story. It is a morality tale.”

February 27, 1986 issue

No End to the Affair

“French politics after 1900 were not the same as before. Perhaps even without the Affair, the new forces—socialists demanding reform, syndicalists calling for direct action, a new right-wing anti-democratic nationalism represented by the Action Française, a renewed movement among the Radicals for the final separation of the Roman Church from the French State—these would have begun to make themselves felt; but there seems little doubt that the Dreyfus experience accelerated these developments.”

May 18, 1967 issue

Acts of Language

Amid the actual violence of Israel’s assault on Gaza, why have so many writers treated pro-Palestine speech as a threat?

June 13, 2024

Israel’s Universities: The Crackdown

Last October, Palestinian students and academic staff in Israel faced unprecedented penalties for their speech. Now the repression persists. 

June 5, 2024

A View from Cairo

The Egyptian government’s repression of its citizens and the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestine are inextricably linked.

May 12, 2024

Migrant Workers in Their Own Land

After closing its borders to Palestinians employed in critical sectors, Israel’s government has faced a labor shortage—which is being met by Indian migrant workers.

April 21, 2024

Cross-Country Tripping

“Even before I ever drove, I was in some sense connected to this resonance with road-tripping by proxy, through the archetypes in literature and cinema, just as I’d become interested in the desert west before I ever got there.”

June 29, 2024

The Mechanic

“Ideally, a poem should happen to the reader.”

June 22, 2024

Enormous Shifts in Consciousness

“Palestine was a central part of the development of my political awareness, which was shaped by the cataclysmic American and American-backed aggressions in the Middle East.”

June 15, 2024

Outstanding Personalities

“Seeing this kind of art again, gathered together, was like a reproach, but also yet another chance to appreciate what I’d failed to early on.”

June 8, 2024

The Problem of Other Minds

Episode Nine of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 11, 2024

Documents of Mundanity

Episode Eight of “The Critic and Her Publics”

May 28, 2024

Why Not Memes?

Episode Seven of “The Critic and Her Publics”

May 14, 2024

Into the Cave

Episode Six of “The Critic and Her Publics”

April 9, 2024