April 6, 2026
In March of last year, about six weeks after Donald Trump returned to the White House, I traveled to Washington for a meeting of American education scholars. The opening panel focused — appropriately enough — on Trump’s threats to university funding, free speech on campus, and more. Then it was time for questions, and I...
Read MoreMarch 30, 2026
Carol Anshien knew exactly what items she was looking for. It was a spring day in 2024, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and she was rummaging through her apartment. Throughout the years, Anshien had carefully preserved her records, which had resulted in high stacks towering around her home. They spanned over more than...
Read MoreMarch 23, 2026
Wrecked over distances I stake out the cabin in satellites but my geography is rainy. Dear territory: (trembling) carry him over the abyss, promise me tenderness. I tell myself the patchwork quilt stitches souls into its cosmos. He vomited three times, strangling anaphylaxis. I wonder what ocean smells like on wind smashing inland. ...
Read MoreMarch 23, 2026
Sky curls up your arms, sun-beats fall so near. Diderot said the body had corresponding attitudes to sound. Did you hear me catch my breath observing the commotion of your legs sturdy on the floor while hers, uplifted, split, and mythologically you became an hourglass, in his encyclopedia a compound pose....
Read MoreMarch 16, 2026
1 Single Helix Three months into 2026, two scandals roil whatever is now meant by the MAGA coalition. Both begin with mysterious deaths: Charlie Kirk’s and Jeffrey Epstein’s. In the nearly six months since Kirk’s murder at Utah Valley University on September 10th a schism has cleaved apart the most online quadrants of MAGA....
Read MoreMarch 9, 2026
Coiled at the center of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a shadowy club committed to the “racial purification” of the American populace. Meeting in luxury hotel suites and bland office towers, these lumpy, balding men — generals, politicians, titans of industry — want to rebalance the composition of their country, and possibly...
Read MoreMarch 2, 2026
Corinne refuses to wash her hair. The water coming out of the hospital showers is poisoned — they really ought to have someone from the Environmental Control Board look into it. Instead they pin her down, scrub her hair, inject her with a sedative, then don’t bother washing the suds out. “From this time on,...
Read MoreFebruary 23, 2026
Before the author Klaus Mann was labeled a mongrel, a queer, a junkie, a communist, and in the curious judgment of the FBI, a “premature anti-Fascist,” he found himself tarred with perhaps the cruelest epithet of all: Dichterkind, they called him, the child of a poet. As with the celebrity offspring of our own era,...
Read MoreFebruary 16, 2026
The name Giuliano Da Empoli might not mean much to American readers, but in Europe the Swiss-Italian writer has established himself as one of the continent’s most fêted political and intellectual commentators. The Wizard of the Kremlin, his 2022 novel about the rise of Putinism, was an instant bestseller and has been adapted into a...
Read MoreFebruary 9, 2026
“Our most sincere film can seem phony.” When François Truffaut wrote that in 1975 he could have been describing Hollywood’s long and largely sorry history of prestige pictures that, at least in the minds of the studios that greenlighted them, took a brave stand on important social issues. Occasionally, when the material had scope or...
Read MoreFebruary 2, 2026
A Poem for Atash (Fire) Atash Shakarami, the aunt of sixteen-year-old Nika Shakarami — arrested and killed during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising — was flogged thirty-eight times in Tehran in November 2025. (Atash means “Fire” in Farsi.) One, Two, Three, Four, seven days before the flogging Fire began to practice leaving her...
Read MoreFebruary 2, 2026
For days, the last tweet my Twitter feed displayed was about the fallout from a U.S. immigration officer shooting an unarmed white woman. Beneath it, two consecutive tweets from Al Jazeera English reported that Iran’s internet was facing severe disruptions. At first, the timestamp of the tweets shifted; the next day, the hour changed to...
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