The Menacing Midcentury Aesthetic of Prestige TV
What lies beneath the sleek stylings of dystopian shows like "Homecoming"
Books & The Arts
The Promise of Polarization
Ideological division was once seen as the solution to America’s political gridlock. What went wrong?
A Cut Above
The liberating disjointedness of Diane Williams’s very short stories
A War Without Civilian Deaths?
What arguments for a more humane approach to war conceal
Hearing Secret Harmonies
How Anthony Powell chronicled the curiously languid world of the English middle class
The Good Place Comes Down to Earth
The show's third season illuminates the hard work of living a better life.
America’s Missing Labor Party
The history of strikes shows that, for lasting success, workers need to capture political power.
Bad Faith
Do atheists think too much like believers?
All the Rage
What a literature that embraces female anger can achieve
The Origins of America’s Enduring Divisions
For Jill Lepore, the United States has always been a nation caught between its sunny ideals and its darker realities.
BoJack Horseman’s Brilliant Crack-Up
The Netflix show's new season is a darkly funny reckoning with grief.
The Tyranny of Personality Testing
The inventors of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator saw it as a path to self-discovery—and a tool of workplace management.
Who Gets to Be a Nobel Prize Winner?
"The Wife" exposes the inequality in a famous novelist’s marriage.
Money for Nothing
Many jobs are pointless. Others are being automated away. In the future, who will still work for a paycheck?
The Vanishing Idealism of Burning Man
Artists head to the desert to build a utopia. But does their work hold up in the real world?
Is Democracy Really Dying?
Why so many commentators share an overly grim view of America’s fate
No Trend Is Spared in Younger
How the show’s new season skewers the book world
Sobriety Art
How Leslie Jamison rejected the link between creativity and alcoholism
Poet of the People
The partisan world of Pablo Neruda
The Remaking of Class
Long a silent presence in American life, class is now sharply felt in upheavals and displacement across the country.
