CATEGORIES

GET IT TOGETHER

In the beginning was the mob, and the mob was bad. In Gibbon’s 1776 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the Roman mob makes regular appearances, usually at the instigation of a demagogue, loudly demanding to be placated with free food and entertainment (“bread and circuses”), and, though they don’t get to rule, they sometimes get to choose who will.

GAINING CONTROL

The frenemies who fought to bring contraception to this country.

REBELS WITH A CAUSE

In the new FX/Hulu series “Say Nothing,” life as an armed revolutionary during the Troubles has—at least at first—an air of glamour.

AGAINST THE CURRENT

\"Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!,\" at Soho Rep, and \"Gatz,\" at the Public.

METAMORPHOSIS

The director Marielle Heller explores the feral side of child rearing.

THE BIG SPIN

A district attorney's office investigates how its prosecutors picked death-penalty juries.

THIS ELECTION JUST PROVES WHAT I ALREADY BELIEVED

I hate to say I told you so, but here we are. Kamala Harris’s loss will go down in history as a catastrophe that could have easily been avoided if more people had thought whatever I happen to think.

HOLD YOUR TONGUE

Can the world's most populous country protect its languages?

A LONG WAY HOME

Ordinarily, I hate staying at someone's house, but when Hugh and I visited his friend Mary in Maine we had no other choice.

YULE RULES

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”

COLLISION COURSE

In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.

NEW CHAPTER

Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?

STUCK ON YOU

Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.

HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG

Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.

REPRISE

Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.

WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?

Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.

COLOR INSTINCT

Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.

THE FAMILY PLAN

The pro-life movement’ new playbook.

President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.

On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.

LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES

Go with the flow like a dead fish.

CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS

The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives

BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS

How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.

THE ARTIFICIAL STATE

A different kind of machine politics.

THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON

Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.

THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE

Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.

THE HOME FRONT

Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.

SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED

Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.

TUCKER EVERLASTING

Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.

The Puppet Masters - Compulsion, complicity, and the art of Bunraku.

The National Bunraku Theatre, in New York recently for the first time in more than thirty years, presented an evening of suicides. The performance, at the Japan Society, consisted of excerpts from two of the company’s most celebrated productions. In the Fire Watchtower scene from “The Greengrocer’s Daughter,” by Suga Sensuke and Matsuda Wakichi, from 1773, the titular character sacrifices herself to save a temple page boy she loves. In a scene from “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki,” by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, from 1703, two lovers are driven to take their own lives. Both plays were inspired by real events, and Chikamatsu’s was followed by a wave of double suicides that led to a ban on further performances. This mirroring of life and art is all the more astonishing given the fact that the actors are not people but puppets.

The Convert - The sudden rise of J. D. Vance has transfixed conservative élites. Is he the future of Trumpism?

Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate had punctuated an astounding rise. Born in the small manufacturing city of Middletown, Ohio, he was raised by a drug-addicted mother and his beloved Appalachian-born grandmother, Mamaw. He worked his way up through storied American institutions: the Marine Corps, Yale Law School, Silicon Valley. “Hillbilly Elegy,” the best-selling memoir Vance published in 2016, made him famous, and his denunciations of Trump as “cultural heroin” for the white working class even more so. A few years later, he was a senator from Ohio, the Republican Party’s most effective spokesman for Trumpism as an ideology, and—both improbably and inevitably—the VicePresidential nominee. “If you think about where he came from and where he is, at forty years old,” the conservative analyst Yuval Levin, a Vance ally, said, “J.D. is the single most successful member of his generation in American politics.”